John Cummins (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have one final question. I omitted to ask it earlier. It relates to an issue which has always been a bugbear for councillors. I spent 11 years on Waterford City and County Council. The timing of when the local property tax notification has to go to Revenue does not correlate with the local authority budget process. It is a separate meeting which has to take place a month ahead of the annual budget for the council. That has an impact since you are shooting blind at that point because you are some way from knowing the outturn figures from the end of the year.

Is there capacity to move the period, given that it is now a well-established practice? I appreciate that when we set this up, we needed ample time to notify homeowners and so on. Now that is a well-established practice, could we consider moving forward the notification period by three weeks to bring it in line with many local authority budgets and at least give local authorities the option of incorporating that decision into the overall budgetary decision? Having one independent of the other does not make sense. It does a disservice to councillors throughout the country to ask them to make blind decisions on property tax and whether to increase it or decrease it, as the case may be, without knowing the parameters of their own budget three weeks later.