Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Exactly. Roads are more predictable, and local authorities, which very often lead the development of roads, have fine-tuned the work on those.

Regarding the point that Deputy Cassells made about the local property tax, the more complicated one makes something, the more one gets away with it. Local government funding is just so confusing. The Government in the last general election talked about not introducing any new taxes. No new income taxes were introduced, but there are things in this that really should be a cause of concern. I do not think that when local property tax was introduced there was an expectation that it would fund housing or roads. It was not sold as such. The point has been made that it is a local property tax, is wholly retained in one particular area and is not a replacement for subvention for projects that comes from central Government. We now have a Committee on Budgetary Oversight. We were told that the purpose of that committee was that if the Opposition makes demands for things to be done, and Deputy Cassell's party has been criticised by Fine Gael quite heavily on this, the committee would have a responsibility to look at them to see if they are possible. Why do we not ask the Committee on Budgetary Oversight to have a look at what the cost would be of making this a wholly local property tax, as opposed to a replacement for the grants that come from various Departments? That would be a valuable and ongoing piece of work for that committee. I know we are supposed to leave our politics outside the door when we come in here, but we in the Social Democrats did our own budget, as other parties do, in advance of the budget being announced. We included in our budget an amount for the cost of precisely such a proposal. However, it is only when one goes looking at this that one realises how costly it is, so we should do that. We should ask the Committee on Budgetary Oversight to look specifically at the local property tax. If it were to be made wholly local and were not to have an equalisation fund, what would that cost be? We should look at the self-fund aspect, which is about councils funding roads and housing, which was not what the public expected of local property tax. We could ask the committee to look at that aspect and ask them what the dynamic would be if it were taken out.