Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses to our meeting. I could be seen to have a slight conflict of interest here because I served on the west Cork citizens information board a number of years ago. I do not really understand where all of this is coming from and I fully agree with many of the sentiments expressed earlier.

In terms of the service in Cork, in 2015 there were 10,834 callers and 18,635 queries, while the figures for 2016 were 10,878 and 18,295 respectively. The figures for this year are already up by 10% on last year. The service is driven locally, by a local board. I was on the board as a community voluntary member. In a different life, the now European Commissioner, Mr. Phil Hogan, decided to rid boards of local volunteers. It is a nice, clever way of having a more dictatorial role over what is going on and it looks like that is what is happening here too.

The witnesses said that no cost benefit analysis has been conducted. Who has instructed the Citizens Information Board, CIB? Representatives from CIB were before us earlier but unfortunately I was not aware of what is going on; otherwise I would have asked those questions of them. Is it a ministerial decision? Is it coming straight from the top? Is the Minister, Deputy Varadkar, turning out to be Mr. Hogan's replacement in life? If so, he needs to come before the people and discuss this because citizens information boards are providing a fabulous service in west Cork and throughout the country. If the Government starts to weaken or water down the service, as has been done with the Leader groups, it will only lead to further erosion of local services, especially in rural Ireland, where we are finding it difficult to survive as it is. Will we be left in a situation where CIB handpicks the boards and there will be no local input? That would be a scandalous decision and it must be resisted by us, as Members of the Oireachtas.

I believe we will lose the independence of the service and that is probably the plan. The aim is to lose the local input. As I said earlier, there were 18,295 queries to the citizens information office in west Cork last year. That office has three full-time, three part-time and five scheme workers and the rest of the workers are volunteers. There are 20 volunteers working there and I can assure everyone that those volunteers would not be there were it not for the local board working and communicating with them and encouraging them to come and help out. A lot of questions need to be asked. The witnesses before us have highlighted the situation for us and this committee must now take it from here. We must determine if we can stop this from happening. Perhaps the witnesses could give us some advice as to the role we could play in that regard.