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

The one thing that seems to be missed in what we were looking at is that the third tier would not only have the councillors on it but it would have extra membership. There has been talk about a council with 20 members but there would have been another 20 members selected beneath that. For example, in Galway it takes 1,500 votes to get elected to the county council but people would get elected with 700 votes on the lower tier and would only sit on the municipal authority. That is missing. If that was restored, we would then have councillors guaranteed for the likes of Wexford town and so on.

I have the great distinction of having served only four weeks as Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, as it was known at that stage. I was in the lucky position that I had three Ministries at the one time - Defence, Housing, Local Government and Heritage, and Social Protection. It was a very effective form of government and we got a lot done in a very short time, including setting up the Tús scheme, among other things, and saving Renmore Barracks.

I will throw this into the mix as my final thought. It always amazes me that if a local authority goes to do anything, for example, build a few houses, it has to go up to Dublin three or four times. Then we get a rush of blood to our heads and say this is really crazy, so we give responsibility to an agency such as Irish Water, give it a lob of money and say, "Go off there and spend it and come back and answer to us once a year." We have to devolve the power to make decisions, give the money and make the body accountable for it on a yearly basis. If it makes a mess of it, it is accountable for that, but not at every stage. The engineers in local authorities are as well qualified as the engineers in the Custom House. There is too much micro oversight of everything. We have plenty of examples where once we devolve the power - Irish Water is one example - we just let them off with the ball of wax and tell them to spend it and they are not accountable to Dublin for every minor decision they make.