Mr. Art O'Leary:

Everything the Senator has said is absolutely right, but to deliver this transformational change is going to cost money and those in government are going to have to decide, one way or the other, whether they want to do it. The revenue-raising powers were discussed. The detail is not in the report, but the members looked at revenue-raising in the same way that cities do all around the world. There is the hotel bedroom tax where €1 or €2 could be added per bed night, for example. We have so many visitors using services to the city and perhaps this would be a way of independently raising revenue as well. There are ways of doing it.

One cannot get away from the fact that delivering transformational change which makes a real difference to people's lives will cost money. In the programme for Government, there is a commitment for directly elected mayors all over the country, so maybe this is a model that should be adopted all around.