Mr. John A. Moran:

I thank the Chairman and the Senator. She has hit on the main points I made. This is a reform of local government. This is going away from a British system, which did not trust the locals, in this case the Irish, and kept control very much in Whitehall and ultimately in the central administration. It is moving to a system whereby devolved powers and associated budgets are supposed to go, and were indeed promised to, local cities and regions across the country eventually and that needs to happen. There are promises it will happen and there is no reason to wait. There are enough problems to be solved. There is a national development plan process happening. There is good sight of what must be done in Limerick over the next 20 years through Project Ireland 2040.

Now is the time to devolve both the powers in legislation and the budget with that. I wish to make it clear that this is not asking for more money. This is taking the money that is essentially allocated to Limerick, and will be allocated to Limerick over the next number of years of a mayoral term, and saying the decisions about the priorities as to who spends and what the money is spent on go to the 40 or so councillors in Limerick and to the directly elected mayor. It is not going to be done by unelected officials in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, who might never have even travelled to Limerick, let alone understand the city as the elected politicians do. According to the legislation, the mayor is going to be responsible for driving and delivering a programme of local government, but has no ability to do so. It is not clear whether the mayor can ever deal with a CEO who is not able to deliver. The Bill is silent on that power and relationship. The mayor does not have any of the decision-making power with respect to the money and the setting of priorities. As the Senator said, the mayor goes cap in hand around the Departments as, effectively, a glorified lobbyist, paid for by the taxpayers to try to get things to move forward. That is neither what was promised in 2019 nor is it going to be what will work in this election.

The point in my report, and I will finish on this as it is a very important political point, is that if we have an election without deciding what the powers of the candidates are and without deciding what the budgets are for the candidates, we will have a free for all of promises that are totally unrealistic. If we have a budget where we clearly give the right powers and an envelope of multi-year funding, then external commentators, including even the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, could assess the promises of the various candidates and help Ms Ryan and her organisation's members and the electorate of Limerick to decide what are and are not real programmes of office. If we do not do that, we will get into a very dangerous situation from my perspective. There will be promises such as "I will convince Dublin to do this" or "I will convince the Department of Transport to do that" and no mechanism for the electorate to decide who is telling porkies and who is being realistic. That is a very dangerous election to have in the current environment. I will leave it at that, but the Senator has raised some very important points.