Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and his officials. I thank him. I do not doubt his commitment. We have soldiered together. I think we were both elected to local authorities in 1999. I have known about the Minister of State's commitment to and track record in local government for a long time.

I have read comprehensively the local authority boundaries paper that has been circulated to the joint committee by the Minister of State. It deals with municipal governance districts, towns and local electoral areas. Although there is a lot of repetition in it, many good points are made in it too. They seem to merge into each other and overlap. That is the nature of local government. The paper features an outpouring of ambition and ideas, but it is clear that not everything in it is going to happen. I found it hard to decipher the difference between what people fed into the consultation process - I refer to the wishes of people, including elected councillors and policy makers in local government - and the recommendations of the Minister of State. I presume this is a process of engagement.

I think I know what the Minister of State is about. He has an opportunity now to correct me if I am wrong. The first thing I took from the paper was a suggestion that the Local Authorities Members Association and, in effect, the Association of Local Government in Ireland are not banging down the door for the re-establishment of town councils. The Minister of State mentioned this issue in his address to the committee this morning and, again, he can correct me if I am wrong. As the suggestion in the paper is totally inconsistent with what I am hearing from councillors, I have to ask whether there is a deficit between them and their representative bodies. I know they are tuning in to this meeting. I am consciously calling on them to clear this matter up.

Clearly, they are representing these councils so they need to square that themselves. It is not a matter for us. We need to know from them if it is the view of their memberships that they are opposed to the re-establishment of town councils or are we saying, in a more fine-tuned and nuanced way, to bed down the current system - I can see Mr. Lemass smiling at me - and let us look at it again after the full five year roll-out? I would be inclined to agree with that. I am happy to say this on the record. We need to be clear about that because it is an important point.

The Local Authorities Members Association, LAMA, and the Association of Irish Local Government, AILG, are very formal organised representative bodies that do a good job in representing councillors. How can we link them into the consultation process around the vision the Minister of State has for local government? It is important to have an ongoing consultation process. These are only two aspects of the bigger picture being planned by the Minister of State but we need to engage with those bodies early in the consultation. Perhaps the Minister of State will outline the timeline as he sees it. We are running into the local elections in June 2019, unless the Minister of State is going to tell us something different. I take it the date is the statutory deadline. We are, therefore, on for that.