Ms Barbara-Anne Murphy:

Go raibh míle maith agat, a Chathaoirligh. Cathaoirleach, Senators and elected colleagues, I did not come here today to complain, but I do wish to bring several issues and matters to their attention. Over the past 30 years or so we have seen improvements to local government in Ireland. From Better Local Government, to the removal of the dual mandate, to the most recent action programme, Putting People First. It has not resulted in better local government. We still have Oireachtas Members who are deeply engaged in the activities of the local authorities and I cannot see who benefitted from Putting People First. Towns that lost their town councillors and autonomy certainly did not and neither did the councillors or our constituents.

As for ending the dual mandate, does anyone here really, truly believe they are happy to leave the activities, decisions and day-to-day issues of the county council to the elected councillors? In our democracy and on the electoral cycles we work to, that is certainly not the case. It is definitely not the case in County Wexford anyway. Over the past 20 years, many services have been taken from the local authorities limiting our relevance, such as higher education grants, refuse collection, issuing driving licences, water services and so on. I could continue. More powers have been given to the executive. They have been taken away from the councillors. Planning legislation and the OPR hugely restrict our decision-making in many areas when we are drawing up our development plans and local area plans. The former Minister, Deputy John Paul Phelan, mentioned this morning that councillors want to be paid as though they held full-time positions while at the same time saying we do not have full decision-making power. There is an easy answer to that. Give us back the decision-making power. Give us a little bit of power. That is all we want. We want to be able to have autonomy over our own counties. To disperse power from central government back to the local councils requires trust, however, and that trust does not exist. It appears the national government has lost trust in our councillors who are elected by the people. Both the national government and the permanent government have lost trust in us.

Much of Wexford County Council's funding comes from central government and the accompanying terms and conditions are highly prescriptive and restrictive as to how the money is spent. As I said, there is a lack of trust in the decision-making capacity of us, as councillors. I should be insulted. For example, in the town of Enniscorthy it would cost €200,000 to build a social house. Why can the funding not be provided for that social house at that level and, were we to go above it, then we would have to go back and look for permission from the Department? At the moment we have professional architects and engineers at national level checking, re-checking and re-checking again professional architects, engineers and so on at council level. It is a complete waste of resources. It really should not be going on and it is just not good enough.

The current methods of funding of local government appear to me to be designed to keep poorer counties poorer and richer counties richer. In County Wexford we do not stand a chance of ever raising sufficient funding to run our county as we would like. This is despite raising our residential property tax by 15% locally over the last number of years to fund economic and community development, and increasing commercial rates to pay for investment in the Fleadh, which is coming to Wexford this year. Our roads need massive investment and yet we do not receive any extra funding to take that into consideration. A 2022 report from the Local Government Audit Service found that almost half of Wexford County Council roads were structurally distressed. That includes national primary, national secondary and local or tertiary roads. That is the result of decades of underfunding by the State of the 96,000 km of road in County Wexford. It does not look like we will get any more in this year's allocation. That will not make anything better. We know the potholes are one of the things that are brought to our attention all of the time by our constituents but our Government will not invest the money in this.

Joint policing committees being discontinued means our role is being diminished. I am absolutely dismayed. It is further erosion of our role as councillors. There are 34 members of Wexford County Council and six of us are women. Of those six, two have decided not to stand again for election. We took a "Flip-It" photograph of the council chamber last summer. One of my male colleagues said, "Why bother? We do not want to see 28 women in the council chamber. Why would you want to give away your seat anyway?". When I said to him, "I do not want to give away my seat I want to give away yours", he did not laugh. If the elected members of the county council's role is going to continue to be diminished why would a woman put herself forward? Why would anyone put him or herself forward? Central government must learn to trust local government and to devolve more powers to us. Devolution or dispersal of power requires trust, as I said earlier. We must restore trust to allow councillors to do the work we can and should be doing. That is the future of democracy.