Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is no secret that I was never a member of a local authority so I am speaking to my experience in this House. I listened to the presentations downstairs in my office and I found myself asking whether we really know what we are doing in the Houses of the Oireachtas to local authorities. In recent years, we stripped county councillors of memberships of boards and of policing and security functions in their local areas, and we have removed them from university boards. There are 520 housing agencies, each with a chief executive officer and a chief financial officer, I assume. Funding to cover the cost of county councillors has been mentioned but we should get rid of the housing agencies and pay the county councillors. What happened to the councils that used to build houses? They built the finest houses in the country. I recall my father telling me that the clerk of works in Galway, when council houses were being built in Mervue, sent timber back if there were knots in it because it was not of the quality that was required. There are a number of former Ministers present and I wonder, when Ministers bring legislation into the Seanad or the Dáil, whether it is genuinely their views that is being brought in or is it something a civil servant put together? We spent two and a half a years here on the Air Navigation and Transport Act Bill before the Minister eventually cracked and said that the legislation was actually written by an outside authority. Actually, it was written by the authority-----