Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

As the Minister of State did not deal with most of my questions, please allow me to go through them again. I fully accept that the intention behind the Bill to solve what is a particularly difficult problem, about which there is no dispute. I also accept that the Minister of State flagged the general principle. Nonetheless, I believe he is underestimating the concerns of committee members in the sense that we are only being given two days to consider the detail of his proposals. There is a big difference between being given a general indication of the policy direction and flagging it and having adequate time to scrutinise the detail of proposals. It is not that we want lots of time to scrutinise them. The committee is incredibly flexible with all of the Minister of State's other ministerial colleagues in providing time, but because of the length of time we are being given to scrutinise the proposals, it is genuinely very tough for us. I am still not clear on why it is that we are being given so little time. For example, when we look at earlier amendments on the holding of plebiscites, there is a very clear rationale as to why the Minister of States needs to include them in the Bill because there is a deadline to meet in compiling the registers, etc. Therefore, I would like to be convinced that this amendment has to be included now, rather than in a stand-alone Bill or in the Local Government Bill 2019.

On the ratio of elected representatives to voters, I have still not heard an adequate explanation. I am not making the argument that there should be exact proportionality. If there was, those in the smaller adjoining local authority would fear that they would be swamped by those in the larger area. I accept that it works both ways. What I do not understand is the reason there should be a simple rigid formula of three and three elected members, with the chairpersons or mayors, as opposed to other options because there will be variations in size. I do not know the demographics of each of the areas listed by the Minister of State, but it seems that there should be some way of thinking it through to avoid the problem he identified to me informally after the meeting, that if you give one too much weight, it will mean that nothing will be agreed. However, I am yet be convinced on that point.

The next issue concerns the process of appointment of elected members. For example, if mine was the majority party in the two councils, is it the case that we could elect the six members? Where would that leave the smaller parties in terms of diversity in representation? Likewise, we must consider the geographical locations of the elected representatives.

I have not heard the Minister of State address how we deal with that or the question about staff. If I am reading the Bill right, the committee will decide what staff it requires from the existing local authorities. Does that have to be approved by the chief executives of those local authorities? Can the chief executives object? What happens if the staff that the committee requests are already busy doing something else? We know there are pressures across all council departments. How will those functions be replaced within existing staff complements?

Whatever this committee decides will have a financial implication which will have to be borne by the two local authorities. How will that work? What happens if there are significant disagreements over budgets, zoning or other things? I am not saying that we should go back to the Drogheda example where local authorities are allowed to block everything. The option the Minister of State has put on the table is not the only one and is not necessarily the clear option.

A number of Deputies asked a reasonable question yesterday about the statutory consultative process with county development plans and local area plans. The local authorities know which steps they have to go through. It is not clear from this what that consultative process is. It is certainly not clear to elected members of the councils or the public, from engagement with them. I will go back to what I said at the start. None of us is trying to be difficult or block the Minister of State from having a solution but in the absence of adequate time to go through all these things and be convinced that what he is proposing is the right way to fix this, many of us will be left in a position of not being able to support it today. I understand his offer to sit down next week and come back with amendments the following week. That is still a very tight timeframe for something that is relatively complex. I appreciate the Minister of State and his officials have been working on it for some time but those of us who are only taking it up now have many other significant things on our schedule in these couple of weeks. Would it not make more sense for the Minister of State to withdraw the amendment at this stage? We will take the offer of engaging with him both immediately before and after Christmas and insert this into the local government Bill 2019. Would that not make more sense rather than trying to shoehorn it into the 2018 Bill within a short timeframe?