Dr. Aodh Quinlivan:

I thank the committee for the invitation. I will go through my statement quickly. I submitted some other documentation to the committee and it is available to the members.

My position is quite straightforward. I was a strong critic of the decision in 2014 to abolish the town councils so I favour the reintroduction of a sub-county tier of local government. When I worked in Cork County Council and did my postgraduate studies by night I was heavily influenced by the former Limerick county manager, Mr. Dick Haslam, who was my main lecturer and my mentor. At that time 25 years ago I frequently heard people throw out the phrase: "In Ireland we do not have local government, we have local administration". The focus was always on the second word, "administration", versus government. When I teach now I prefer to focus on the neglected first word, "government".

If local government is not local it is nothing. Local government exists for two primary reasons, as a provider of local public services and as an instrument of local democracy to give expression to community self-government. This is based on the principle of subsidiarity which states that as many powers and functions as possible should be devolved to the level closest to the citizen. Ireland has signed up to that principle under the Council of Europe's European Charter of Local Self-Government, the EU's treaty of Amsterdam and under Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, as the Council of Europe pointed out in 2013, we are hypocrites. We use the rhetoric of subsidiarity, power to the people and putting people first, but our public policies go in the opposite direction.

As members know, local government in Ireland is extremely weak. Staggeringly, it lacks constitutional protection and, accordingly, a tier of directly elected institutions, the town councils, was abolished in 2014 without reference to the people by way of a referendum, unlike for Seanad Éireann. In terms of the numbers of local authorities and local councillors, we have the most disconnected model in Europe. This year we celebrate the 120th anniversary of the first local elections, which brought the current system of local government into being. At that time we had over 600 local authorities and we gradually whittled that down to 114. Now we have 31, which is soon to be 30 if Galway City Council and Galway County Council merge. The international local autonomy index places Ireland in 38th place out of 39. Ireland is not only more centralised than developed democracies such as Austria, Finland and Germany, it is also more centralised than Macedonia and Albania. Only Moldova ranks below us.

This is relevant to any discussion on town councils. We have blindly followed an appealing but fundamentally incorrect narrative which is that big is better, cheaper, means improved services and is more efficient. The problem is that the international research evidence refutes that narrative. The evidence informs us that a smaller number of larger local authorities does not yield improvements, savings and efficiencies. To paraphrase Professor Howard Elcock, the amalgamation and abolition of local authorities is an addiction suffered by central governments.

The knock-on effects are serious. The council elected in May 2019 in Cork city will have a ratio of one councillor for 6,800 citizens. This is a massive number in comparison with one to 120 in France, one to 210 in Austria and one to 350 in Germany. It is leading to a political fallout. Almost one third of the current members of Cork City Council are not standing for election in May, three of the young newly elected councillors in 2014 are bowing out and half of the female elected members are leaving. Many of these councillors have cited the fact that their jurisdictions are too large and require them to be full-time councillors, yet they are not being rewarded with a full-time salary and find it next to impossible to balance their council roles with their daily working lives and family commitments. We are moving in the wrong direction but the members here have the opportunity to reverse that trend.

I will turn to a few specific arguments in favour of re-establishing a town council tier. First, town councils were the most efficient element within the local government system in terms of being self-financing and maintaining commercial rates at a lower level than their county council counterparts. Killarney has been mentioned. At the time of its abolition Killarney Town Council had the highest rate take in Kerry with the lowest rate in euro, so there is an efficiency argument to be made.

Second, on democratic grounds and to cite evidence, as opposed to rhetoric or an appealing narrative, the wealth of evidence suggests that there is a negative relationship between the size of a local government unit and the political trust which citizens have in local elected members - in other words, the smaller the unit and the closer it is to us, the more trust we have in it. We are invested in how the town is run and how money is spent. "Putting People First" was a lovely slogan to attach to the policy document of October 2012, which proposed to abolish the town councils. The truth is that we have removed people from the equation. We are asking them to participate through fixyourstreet.iein the absence of the town council. The citizen was barely mentioned in "Putting People First". She was kidnapped and replaced by the consumer. We opted to champion efficiency over democracy and we have achieved neither.

Third, it is important to point out that more women were elected to town councils than to any other level of government in Ireland. Election to one's town council was in reach for many people because if one was organised and availed of a network of family and friends one could win a seat with a few hundred votes. Town councils were a useful entry point into politics for young people generally, women, people from different ethnic backgrounds, people with disabilities and so forth. In removing that political entry point we have narrowed the pool of people who are willing or able to contest elections for city and county councils. The result is councils that are dominated by middle aged and elderly grey haired men who can afford to be full-time local public representatives.

I have deliberately not spoken to the specifics of the Bill. I believe that there must be a tier of sub-county government in Ireland, and it is up to the elected representatives to tie down the specifics. There is no doubt that, as Deputy Howlin indicated, the old town council model was severely flawed. The councils covered only 15% of the population and the population range went from 298 to 30,000. We need a new model, but powers and finance must be devolved downwards to give it meaning.

The municipal districts are now in place and have been reasonably successful, but in a very narrow way. I have spoken to councillors and the effectiveness of the districts varies enormously between and within local authorities. They have played a role, partly because they are comprehensive and more or less cover the entire country. However, let us be honest about the fact that they are glorified area committees of the county councils. Let nobody pretend that they are an elected tier of local government.

At the overall level we must relax the vice-like grip of centralisation which is suffocating local autonomy. Paulo Coelho wrote that "a mistake repeated more than once is a decision". Since 1922 we have been making decisions in favour of centralisation. Now we must start making decisions in favour of local democracy and local self-government. Town or municipal councils should be at the heart of our local government system. The nature of local government is that civic society is up close and personal. Local councils and the services they provide have a far more immediate, continuous and comprehensive impact on our daily lives than many issues which dominate nationally.

Local councils and councillors must deal with a range of issues and factors that are not of their making and for which they may, in some cases, have no formal responsibility. These issues include migration, multiculturalism, homelessness, social exclusion and other social problems such as drug addiction and petty crime. Many of the social problems faced by Irish communities today are most sharply evident in urban settings and towns.

In 1924 the Dáil debated the abolition of rural district councils in the name of efficiency and cost savings. What was really meant was centralisation. During the debate, Deputy John Daly from Cork asked, "what would a man from Bantry Bay know about affairs in Araglen?" The world is a smaller place today and we have a continuous 24-7 new cycle and social media, but John Daly knew what he was talking about. He ended his contribution by saying that local representatives know their area best of all and should be given the power to tackle local problems appropriately. It really is as simple as that. Local government must be local.