Mr. Joe Conway:

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Chathaoirleach agus leis na Seanadóirí. Tá mé fíorbhuíoch dóibh as an deis seo a thug siad chun mo thuairimí suaracha a nochtadh don choiste anseo.

I have a short few words to say and this is based on two worries I have for the future of local democracy. First, I want to make a distinction between local administration and local democracy. As councillors, we very often get absorbed with local administration. We have budgets, reserve powers and local area planning, and these things can occupy a great amount of a councillor’s time. However, as councils in local democracy and local administration in Ireland, like any organisation, we have to ask ourselves the fundamental question of whether this business is relevant and, if not, whether it is redundant. There are two salient reasons that local government and local democracy in Ireland are becoming quickly redundant. They are the lack of participation of young people in local democracy and the very unequal involvement of the female gender in local democracy.

We can address these issues in a couple of ways. Most councils are working with might and main to achieve the registration of young people and also to make sure we have some sort of a vibrant public campaign to get the young people who have registered interested in voting. This may involve a new programme of civics or citizen education in second-level schools, or possibly the designation of schools as saffron flag schools, which was discussed some years ago. Rather like the green schools or environmental schools, saffron flag schools would have an accredited programme of citizen education in the school.

Moving on from that, our council has 32 members, of whom six are female. It is not like this august body, the Seanad, which is nearly at gender balance, with 26 female Members out of 60. That is largely down to the fact there is a big input from the Taoiseach's nominations. With the movement towards directly-elected mayors, I wonder if we will be looking at a scenario down the road of mayors having mayoral appointments to the council, whereby the youth and female imbalance might be addressed.

I am 70 years of age. I am looking around here and see that most of us are certainly faoi bhláth agus muid meánaosta - we are in the full blast of middle age - and some of us are getting on into the winter of our years. It tells its own story that we have a lot of grey-haired men here, very few women and no youth. I know it is all relative but the Cathaoirleach will understand the thrust of what I am saying.