Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 83:

In page 60, to delete lines 32 to 34 and substitute the following: “(i) the majority of the elected council approves a proposal by resolution,”.

I will speak about amendment No. 83, and then amendment No. 84. This amendment is about how to initiate a plebiscite on having a directly elected mayor. There a few different ways in the Bill that a plebiscite can be initiated. One is the corporate policy group of a local authority submits a report to the elected council of the local authority recommending a proposal that there be a plebiscite, and if a majority of the council go with that, there can be a plebiscite. My amendment seeks to effectively take out the role of the corporate policy group in that. I am not sure what the rationale is as to why the corporate policy group must be involved and what the benefit of that is and why it should not simply a majority of the elected members without having to go through the corporate policy group. Certainly, I am sure it varies from local authority to local authority but while there is a proportionality in the composition of the corporate policy group, it is not 100% proportional. It can be a little bit skewed in terms of the majority. Probably more significantly, I know a number of local authorities, for example, will webcast their main council meetings so they are fully transparent and the media and members of the public can attend, whereas that does not apply to corporate policy group meetings, which are effectively behind closed doors. There is not that same level of transparency in terms of the corporate policy groups. Indeed, by their very nature they are very close. They have a very close relationship between the elected members of the council who run the corporate policy group and the executive of the council. It would be very challenging to see a proposal come through a corporate policy that the chief executive of the council was opposed to. It is possible but chief executives do have very high influence, particularly on the way corporate policy group meetings are structured, are called, the agendas are formed, and everything else, whereas the elected members have a bit less in terms of a power imbalance in local authorities and in terms of the full elected council. I just do not see the benefit or rationale of having to go through the corporate policy group unless that is designed as a mechanism to make it more difficult for elected members to call plebiscites by a majority. That is actually what the wording I seek to take out does.

Amendment No. 84 is about how a plebiscite could be called by getting a petition with signatures of the electorate. The current wording in the Bill is more than 20% of the electorate of an administrative area of a local authority and I seek to reduce that to 10%. The rationale for this is, and I spoke about it on Second Stage, that even to achieve 10% of signatures of the full electorate in the local authority area is a threshold that is very high and very difficult to achieve in practical terms. If we think about 20% and trying to get those registered, and if we had a campaign to do that and called to every accessible home in the local authority area, considering urban areas with apartments and so forth, 80% of homes would not be accessible. Even if we imagine that 80% of homes were accessible, to achieve a 20% signatory rate, one in four or one in three homes might answer, and at best, at particular times of the day, one in two might answer.

Let us just imagine we get the maximum number and that one in two answer. To achieve the 20% required, we probably would need everyone present at the time we called to sign the petition. If one person in the entire local electoral area said they did not think it was a good idea and did not agree with it, it would probably be physically impossible to get 20%. We would have to call around every home a second and perhaps a third time, and even then we still might not get the 20%, even if there is a clear majority in the electoral area that wants to sign this. It is just the logistics of getting that. It could be said this could be done online and we could make it available, but if it is an online petition and there is a mechanism around that, in reality, to achieve these sorts of massive large numbers, a door-to-door campaign would be needed. Ten per cent is almost impossible to achieve and 20% is utterly impossible. It makes this provision of the Bill, the public being able to call a plebiscite, redundant and unachievable unless the Minister of State is able to explain to me in practical terms how that could be achieved.