Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

My big fear is that, because of our multiparty system, a majority on the council might be made up of three or four parties. Some of those may be in government and some may not. It would be too easy to achieve 50% and that is why I would not propose it. It is still easy to achieve 33% and we could easily see tensions between coalition parties in governments playing out in a council, where councillors feel they have more freedom and may want to land a punch that cannot be done at national level. They do it with the freedom to vote for it while saying it is not them making the decision but the Minister.

I do not think we made a specific proposal but some of the discussions we had here suggested we should give the councillors the power in its entirety and let them deal with the consequences of it. The difficulty with what we have done is we have set up a process where councillors can have a good kick off national government by voting for or against an impeachment motion and do not have to deal with the consequences with the electorate because they will say the Minister has to deal with it in the end. One way of solving the issue was giving them the power in its entirety and letting them deal with the consequences of taking out a popular mayor. The problem with the current proposal is it ends up back on the Minister's desk and that becomes a politicised move, no matter what the Minister does.