Mr. Robin Mandal:

As I said, we are gifted in that we have extremely good public representatives at all levels. They are very engaged across the parties. Because there has been so little time to analyse this we have not been able to engage with them to warn them that they are about to be further disempowered but we intend to do that. We hope they will be part of that bottom-up balance to the top-down. They are so important to the way our society works and I say this as someone who has fought with them for many, many years. I will not give the Senator a history lesson because he knows all this stuff anyway but it goes back to when we stopped rates and started to take back everything. Ms Foster spoke about Sebastian Vencken, the guy from the Netherlands who is on our executive committee. He is our statistician. I will probably get the figures wrong, but he says that mostly in Europe, around 40% of state expenditure is in municipalities, that is raised and spent. In Ireland it is something like 5% or 10%. So just follow the money. There is no power. Once they lost their base of raising money the power began to diminish. One of the things that concerns me in this Bill is that there is no replacement for section 48 of the 2000 Act that so they do not seem to have the right to impose the levies anymore. The board does but why should the board and not the local authority? There are so many bits of the Bill that just do not add up. Having said that, one thing I very strongly approve of in the Bill is the restriction on the material contraventions. There is an out for the board but it is a small one. I am desperately trying to be positive as well as picking out the bits of the Bill.