Dr. Aodh Quinlivan:

It was very important to them symbolically. It was based on the idea of democracy, that one devolves to the bottom. It involves a bottom-up approach whereby as many powers and functions as possible are left at the lowest level, what cannot be done at this level is passed up to a higher tier, and what that tier cannot do is passed up to the state. National government should do a few things well, not a lot of things badly. It has too much going on.

We possibly look at things in a piecemeal fashion. We need to look at local government reform as a total piece in terms of devolving powers and functions. We are looking at town councils here. Plebiscites to introduce directly elected mayors will take place. We have seen no proposals for local government reform generally. As has been acknowledged, perhaps housing has dominated the Department's agenda. Regarding town councils, a very simple point is that the towns with town councils were better in my opinion when it came to libraries, swimming pools and the sense of civic community. Mr. Smith spoke about the support of the chambers of commerce because, unfortunately, that certainly was not the case in 2014. They generally bought into the idea of efficiency and abolishing town councils, so it is good that they might be turning around and appreciating things.