Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil leo siúd a labhair anseo inniu. Bhí mé sa Seanad anseo ón 16 Lúnasa 1989 go dtí Mí na Samhna 1992. Bhain mé an-taitneamh as a bheith sa Seanad ach bhí mé sásta dul go dtí an Dáil freisin. I spent six years on Galway County Council and I was unusual in that I actually got into the Seanad. I failed to get elected in 1985 in the local elections but I got into the Seanad in 1989 and then went on a local authority in 1991. I was a Senator before becoming a local authority member. I found the experience of being on a local authority to be absolutely rewarding and it had a huge effect on my political development. My experience of being an Oireachtas Member and a councillor at the same time was generally positive. I feel and felt at the time of the abolition that without the Oireachtas Members, the counter-balance to the management that was needed was not there. If the various groups of the council, for example, were being told this or that cannot be done because of Dublin and so on, it was very easy for the Oireachtas Members to come back to Dublin to get quick answers as to whether that was true. I also found that having been a councillor, you realised the impact of day-to-day services on people. Often we spend a lot of time talking about big policy and that is usually important but we know that when we go home, it is the road to your house, the repairs to your house, whether you own the house and are looking for a HAOP grant or an adaptation grant or it is a local authority house, that really matter. All of these are vital to human existence and should not be dismissed because they do not fall into the realm of big policy.

The structure we have is fairly simple. We have a relatively small number of large local authorities in international terms and we only have two tiers, if one ignores for a minute the regional tier. If we get into questions and answers, I may give my views on that later. The tendency over the past ten years has been to make some of them even bigger. As my colleague beside me is aware, Waterford and Limerick were amalgamated into single councils. While there also was a proposal for Galway and Cork, some very powerful voices in Cork scuppered Cork and not-so-powerful voices in Galway scuppered Galway. This was because the idea of the city and the county being in one area, when you looked forward to population protection, would have meant that the peripheral areas would have less and less of a say both proportionally and actually. I believe we should be going the other direction. We find lots of room for lots of people but we seem not to have room for the elected representative. One thing the public service likes is the tidy mind syndrome with everything uniform.

There is a pervasive syndrome that all local authorities should be of a similar size and we should not have Cork as a local authority and we should not have Leitrim as a local authority but they should have equal representation per thousand of population. Taking our history and geography, local loyalties, particularly loyalty to a county, and problems into account, the idea of putting bits of Kilkenny into Waterford and all these nice fancy ideas that geographers come up with because of their new geography that ignores the old geography, are doomed to failure and do not get public support.

During the period from 2008 to 2011, I was on a subcommittee that was looking at local authorities. People often talk about town councils. One issue we had a big debate about, and I am clear on what side of the debate I was on, was something I could never understand, which was the obsession with towns and why rural areas do not need representation. We need footpaths and streetlights as all small villages do. We need roads and all the services, including water, that the urban areas need. That might not have been true 100 years ago but there were local rural councils. They were abolished because of corruption in the 1930s. I do not think anyone visualised at that time that they would not return in the 90 years since. Therefore, we were proposing a third tier of government but not what has happened, which is not really a third tier of government but municipal authorities or groups that meet, have discussions and make no decisions. The idea was that the municipal authorities would be strong, funded, have a dedicated office and dedicated finance, and that every decision would be made by them autonomously and not everything would be referred to the local authority. In fact, the idea was that there might be fewer local authority meetings because so much of the small decision-making would happen locally. There was ongoing discussion at the time, which we did not conclude, about the membership. We were all agreed that members should be elected but it was felt that the membership would, unlike the town councils, include all local authority members elected for that area but would have a top-up of more members to make them viable councils and, as well as that, to get into the nooks and crannies of communities that are not represented. I think they should be considered again because we need starter politics for people, particularly with the challenges around minority groups, women and so on, getting elected, which we have seen. It would be an opportunity for people to start their careers at the very local level and build to the county and national levels, perhaps skip a few layers, until they get as far as Europe.

One thing that concerns me at the moment, and I have seen it in the elections for Údarás na Gaeltachta and elsewhere, is the notion that we cannot afford democracy because elections are dear. Autocracy would be a lot dearer. One thing we, as politicians, must knock on the head is the idea that democracy is dear. It is incredibly cheap compared to any other form of government. We have to accept that democracy is the best option despite its faults. There are certainly faults in it because humans always have faults but it is much better than being ruled by experts and administrators, all of whom have their roles. They tend to be specialised while a politician tends to take a lateral view and to take all circumstances into account, including local acceptability.

One thing I am absolutely passionate about, and I think this has come to the fore, is the need to remunerate elected members commensurate with the work they do. Of course, the media will have a field day if we do that, but who is running the country? Is the media or is it us? The volume of work we all have to do as public representatives has grown exponentially since my day. We used to get documents of three or four pages because somebody had to manually type everything. They are now getting more and more complex. There were literally thousands of pages of backup documentation for the county plan in Galway. Therefore, decision-making has become much more complex. I think it is fair to say that most or many councillors find it hard to combine work, council membership and family. In this regard, unless a councillor has a private source of means, for example, a pension, many councillors do not have the financial resources to go full time or the time resource to combine, family, work and council membership at the same time in an adequate fashion.

We must also resource local authority members in terms of backup to challenge the proposals of management in a meaningful way. There is also an issue nowadays, and I think all of us suffer from this syndrome, of being 100% available on our phones and through email, and generally people coming to you in a way that would not previously have been imaginable. I came here in 1989 for my first elected role. I had a brick of a mobile phone but nobody else had one. After 5 p.m., nobody rang me. There were no emails so unless you received communication in the morning or afternoon post, you did not get it and so on.

One thing I have not favoured is the dilution of the role of the local authority or elected people. I am very strong on elected people. We now have local community development committees, LCDCs, strategic policy committee, SPCs, and all of these groups that answer to nobody, never stand for election and still want more and more say in what happens. On the other hand, we have downplayed and downgraded the role of the local authority. Have I run out of time?