Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As I said, these extraordinarily big changes to the Bill have come late in the day without any consultation with the wider public. If I had not noticed two issues in the Bill, one in Galway and another that came up yesterday, I probably would not have engaged in detail.

I do not think anybody can argue with the idea, whether it is Carlow, Athlone or wherever, of trying to have some creative planning between the two parts of the town. That has to be grappled with. The basic idea of a committee is fine but we all know that the devil is in the detail. Big, broad policy is very easy. It is the implementation and the detail that are the difficult parts. There are a number of serious trends here that I would worry are a precursor for a much wider application of a new process. If there is a little bit of one county with a massive part of another, for example a little bit of Kilkenny in with Waterford, how are they going to divide up the elected members? I am not going to repeat what was said. I do not like corporatism as a form of government. I really like democracy. I like its egalitarianism whereby the so-called least in our society in terms of the elites have the same shout as those who have the PhDs and all the other things after their names. The life I have led has been very interesting. Having moved from a middle class Dublin upbringing, where most of my family and classmates had access to third level education at a time when not everybody did, to the west of Ireland, I found the ordinary people who had been to that greatest of universities, the universities of life, could buy and sell me thought-wise, in terms of foresight, any day of the week.