Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There should be that transfer of information. The Association of Irish Local Government, AILG, is not here today. I want to acknowledge the work that it does. The AILG came out with the old Association of Municipal Authorities of Ireland and the General Council of County Councils. In the past decade, since I left my local authority, it has professionalised the training for councillors. I acknowledge that because it is one of the good things that has happened.

One area has become obvious to me from listening to the exchanges here this morning. Mr. Doyle mentioned the board of directors. I heard that when I was first elected to a local authority. I have been on a board of directors and have chaired a board of directors. It is very different. My relationship with the manager, as chairperson of a board of directors, is very different to that with a cathaoirleach of a local authority or that of the members of a local authority, in terms of the power balance.

One of the areas in which training is needed, through working with the Department, is when councillors are elected. I think the Institute of Public Administration, IPA, also has an involvement in this regard. The budget comes in October and councillors are elected, some of whom are coming in for the first time. I also bear in mind that there has been a gap over the past two years because of Covid when training could not have happened. It is important that training happens immediately on the budget process. Is there anything the Department can do to help the AILG with that?

We need to give councillors the confidence because of the power balance. I am not having a go at anybody. During my time in a local authority, I was very lucky. We had an excellent chief executive, Mr. Peter Carey, at the time. However, councillors are reluctant to question a county manager or a director of service because, sometimes, it can make life hard for a councillor on some of the councils. That is just a matter of a fact.

Councillors do not always realise that they have the power. I constantly say to councillors that they are the corporate structure. The legal entity of the local authority is the people in the chamber. It is not the officials, who are employees. That is always forgotten. Training needs to be done the minute councillors are elected. It needs to be inducted into councillors that they have that power within the first month. As for a lot of stuff raised this morning, I saw myself that when an audit report came before a meeting of the council, two members of the council would have been on the audit committee and it was noted and approved and went through. A councillor should have the confidence to pause and say there is a problem. That has come up here many times this morning.

In terms of the accountability mechanism, they are separate entities and rightly so. I am an ardent defender of local democracy. They are separate units of government. I argue they should have more powers but the chamber needs to have the power, confidence and the ability to hold local authority officials to account. That is very important. I highlight those issues for all the senior officials here. The officials present have considerable interaction with the county managers but do not have such interaction with the councillors and I understand why. Structurally, why would they?

What is the role of the councillor? What powers do they have? These questions are very important. They have some more powers in the most recent local government legislation, about which I think many councillors are not even aware. Training on powers and the budget should happen within the first five or six weeks. I have gone off subject.