Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Some of this is me just teasing it out but given that the original decision to hold plebiscites in the other three cities was taken in 2018, and here we are five years on, it not that the quills move slowly, to use a very eloquent phrase that Mr. O'Leary used. It is about political will. One could have a general scheme in four months but it would require a Government to decide what is in the general schemes. General schemes do not take that long to write; it is the legislation and regulations that are time-consuming. Ultimately, this comes down to political will and to what the Government actually wants the directly elected mayor to do. That decision does not take very long. The reason Deputy John Paul Phelan's White Paper, which I thought was a very strong White Paper, has ended up with such weak legislation is that rather than the Government just deciding on it, it got lost into the system of civil servants, State agencies and the City and County Managers Association. They were all protecting their interests, and not wanting to devolve and change power. That is because the Government was not going to take a decision on it at the start.

The key thing is for the Government to decide as quickly as possible. To reassure Mr. Gavin, our hope is to get the report to the Government on time. Our job is not to repeat the work of the Citizens' Assembly but to make a number of very straightforward recommendations to the Government. We are hoping to settle that before the Dáil rises. Then it is up to the Government to decide early and publicly what it wants to do. Once that happens, everything becomes much easier. My fear, as we have learned from the process that brought us from John Paul Phelan's White Paper to Kieran O'Donnell's Bill, is getting the political decision is going to be the tricky thing. That is a separate day's craic.