Mr. Michael Sheehan:

A Chathaoirligh and Seanadóirí, I find myself in a tricky situation when the order is alphabetical and the name of your county starts with "W" everyone else has said everything else before you. I am looking here to see what I can do to split hairs but I am thankful for the opportunity to come here and talk about this. I wanted to say that I come from the best town in Ireland but now that has been taken by the lads in the west. Can I clarify for the record that New Ross is the best town in the east of the country. If we could agree on that we are on the hoof. I want to talk about three particular issues that pertain to me and have come up in various guises. I commend all of the cathaoirligh go léir on their contributions. It can be seen how passionate we are about our country and what we do and how passionate we are in saying we are being held back by a lot of constraints nationally.

One of the areas where progress has been made but where there is a great deal more progress to make is in the provision of offices. Councillor O'Donovan spoke about being an officeholder, and an office owner and user. Like him, I am one of probably a dozen county councillors in the country who operate and have my own constituency office, which I have had since 2009. The difficulty is we are now forced to pay rates, rent and utilities. The county councils are very quick, like anybody else, to come to us to say we need to pay our rent or rates. I have had this with the county councils and I said to them, "Hold on a second. Oireachtas Members do not have rates. Why do we have rates? Why do we have to do this?" The difficulty is the county councils say that it is the law. To the Senators, I understand that this is part of the programme for Government. The Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, intends to change this. I urge him to do it. The reason is we are not eligible for any grants that are going because we are not a business. We cannot look for a rates knock-out because we are not a charity. We are essentially caught in a no-man's-land.

We have agreed to disagree with Wexford County Council, which wants its rates. It involves a couple of years' worth of rates because an argument is going on. It is approximately €8,000 and Wexford County Council wants to go to court over it. I said to its officials we will go to court but the Minister has said he will sort this. We have agreed to disagree until the local elections because, politically, it would be wrong for me to ask for rates to be struck out. It would also be wrong for me to close the office in the shadow of a local election. We are absolutely bolted into this. I ask the committee to take that on board, look at it, and give us parity of esteem. The reason is quite simple. The committee might be told that we have the local representative payment and we might have allowances, but €100 a week for an office is rent for a pretty bad office. The local representation allowance, LRA, is €5,000 a year, which means our allowances are gone. That does not take into account utilities, staffing or, God forbid, if we want to get a sheet of paper. I ask for that to be taken on board.

I will make the second of my three points. The issue of personal liability and privilege was raised by Councillor Gearóid Murphy. There is an issue in that regard. In preparation for the forthcoming local elections, somebody said to me that the Ireland of today is very different from the Ireland of five years ago. It stopped me dead in my tracks because that is dead right. Councillors are getting sustained attacks and sustained undermining. In County Wexford, my colleague, Councillor Barbara-Anne Murphy, another colleague and I, sustained nothing but abuse on the floor of the Oireachtas from a Member from Wexford. We were accused of doing all things during the development plan. We were accused of doing everything that you could think of illegally and we could not defend ourselves. We know that names cannot be mentioned from what is said at the opening of the committee, but it was clearly identified who it would be. We watched somebody assassinate our characters on television and we could not do anything about it. I ask that privilege be extended to us, or reduced on the floor of the Dáil, and that strong Chairs go after those Members who are out to politically character assassinate us on the grounds of Leinster House.

My last point pertains to every public representative but we will increasingly see it pertaining to candidates. We need to deal with online abuse. We need to deal with anonymous accounts that put everything up. As soon as it goes up, it is absolutely true because, sometimes, we feel we live in a post-truth reality. It does not make a difference whether it is true or not. If it is up there, it is a case of, "Let us see them defend it." I ask for that to be dealt with because the Garda is hamstrung in what it can do. Like Councillor O'Callaghan, I have had five incidents where the Garda pursued somebody for homophobic slurs and all sorts of slurs. We recently had situations where our names, addresses, telephone numbers and eircodes were about to be uploaded because of a contentious issue in Rosslare, where people were being told, "Go get 'em." That is where we are at in terms of Oireachtas Members and our politics. We are moving to a post truth and are literally fair game. That can be seen. Councillor McGrath was correct when she said it is very difficult to get candidates to come forward. Anybody who has a decent job or decent life is looking at what we do and asking why they would bother. Particularly if you have a party icon or logo, it is like a birthmark or bull's eye. You are in for it no matter where you go.

My concern is that all this social media is having a corrosive effect. All it is doing is creating a situation where the last thing somebody should ever want to be is a public representative. For all of us here, that is the last thing we ever want to say. I thank the committee for the opportunity. I say, "Well done" and congratulate the Cathaoirleach for listening to us.