Shane Cassells (Meath West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will make just a quick point. This topic frustrates me. We should spend a month on it because we deal with it maybe once a year. The Comptroller and Auditor General in his report always refers to the myriad funding going into local government, but the matter comes in and out of here in half a day. We should spend a whole month on it because it has the biggest impact on local people's lives bar none. That self-funding aspect for housing and roads was a huge sleight of hand that the ordinary person would not have understood in the context of aspects of local government that were previously funded through a central fund from the Custom House. Counties such as Meath, Kildare and Dublin were now having to fund this themselves out of people's local property tax, as opposed to the funding coming from a central fund. That was a huge issue, and the impact is of course that there is less money to spend on some other aspect of local services. People ask where their local property tax is going, but suddenly these moneys are being used to fund what had previously been funded through a central Government fund. That is the sleight of hand. These are the kinds of things that need to come out into the public domain in order that people can understand the significance of what is being done in the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government and the impact it is having on local services. It is a question of how one squares the circle of promising people there will be no increase in their property tax, that the Government is actually going to reduce it, and that counties such as Dublin and Meath can retain all their property tax but the Government will somehow find the money to fund services in Leitrim and Longford as well. It is voodoo mathematics.