Pat Casey (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish to comment on the process. Let us revert to the establishment of the municipal districts and the town councils. Bray, in my area, has a significant population of between 25,000 and 30,000. There is a critical mass of people where it does not make sense to have a municipal district. The issue is identifying that figure. There are large populations in Bray and even in Wicklow town, which is getting close to 15,000, and the system gets bogged down in trying to implement measures. Not only do they have to be agreed to a municipal level, they then have to be forwarded to local authority level to be adopted. That delays and stagnates the process. Deputy Cassells mentioned a point that I had never thought of, which is that town councils were never allowed to expand the population in their area. For example, the population immediately outside of Wicklow town was 50% of that in the town. The town council was not allowed to expand because the county council wanted to maintain its commercial rate base.

On the issue of finance, it did not matter whether a town council or a county council ran a deficit, the issue was how it was managed. That was down to management, not down to the status of the council. We had bad county councils and we had bad town councils but that was down to the management of finance in both fora. When one reads the documents, it appears the Minister is half indicating that we can call a municipal district with a population of 15,000 a town district. He is replacing the word "council" with "district". Are we going reverting?

The Minister of State states that he will give town councils more financial powers and more financial autonomy. Equally, he made a statement there would be efficiencies in going back to one finance system. If each municipal district has financial autonomy and is given powers in respect of commercial rates and parking charges, together with changes to the local property tax, we are going back to the same financial model. The Minister of State is giving them the strength. I am not too sure why he will not say there is a move back to the town council model in what is being put before us here.

There is a critical population level at which the county council structure does not work and, therefore, significant powers and resources need to be given to a municipal body to tackle that. It is not working in Bray in respect of housing, rent collection, and planning, especially in respect of the town plan. Two processes have to be gone through to get anything done.