Mr. Dermot Lacey:

Thank you. It is an honour to be speaking in this building. I could get used to it, but we will see. I have been a councillor since 1993. I have been very fortunate and have held nearly every job one can have in local government. I have written about local government and talked about local government. On any of those points, the committee can ask me any question, and I have also made a lengthy submission.

I have a very simple view. I believe Ireland can be transformed through local government reform. It is a very simple political premise but I believe it. Suffice to say that the record of successive governments has not been especially great. Senators should be reminded that, only this month, they passed legislation that further took power from councillors, the Planning and Development Bill, which removes powers from us, and there was the massive attack on the joint policing committees, which has removed the power of councillors to elect the chairperson, set the agenda and so forth. I ask Senators to reflect a little on the more recent record as well as the longer record.

The reality is that all of this is done because the civil servants and the Department want it to be done. I have six points to make. The first is that breaking the stranglehold of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage is the key step to reforming local government. We do not need a civil servant telling us what agendas we should have, who should be chair and so forth. That is a key point.

Second, the national pay agreements usually load councils with the responsibility of implementing much of them and the implementation of the pay deals, yet there is no representative of councillors or local government at any of the pay talks. Therefore, the second point I would make is that AILG or LAMA should be represented at those talks and, in particular, at the national economic dialogue.

The third point is that councillors have no role in the appointment of the chief executive. The current system is like the board of Aldi appointing the managing director of Lidl. It is daft and should be changed.

Fourth, any quango that involves local government should have a local government representative. The fact is that all of these agencies have no elected representative at their heart, which is wrong.

Fifth, as the Labour Party representative, I want to say in particular that we have to deal with the issue of pay. In the Moorhead report, a councillor’s salary was linked to that of a civil servant, yet that same civil servant has received at least three increments since that process started whereas councillors have not received any. By the way, Senators and TDs are at the top of the incremental scale so it does not affect them. If the Minister wants to honour the Moorhead report, he should bring in the increments.

The next point concerns the SPC chairperson’s allowance. This was set at €6,000 some 20 years ago and it is now taxed. I do not know of any other job where there has been no increase in 20 years and it is now taxable, so I ask that that be changed.

The third point on pay is the issue of municipal district chairpersons and area committee chairpersons. Dublin has no municipal districts so the chairpersons of the area committees, which in most cases are larger than MDs, receive no payment while our rural colleagues get payments of up to €12,000.

The final point I want to make is this. We have all talked about the financing of local government. I doubt if anybody in Ireland understands how local government is financed, including the people in the Department responsible. I have called for years for a national forum on the financing of local government to be established, where we would agree a system of financing. The political debate can be held afterwards as to what the rates and charges are, and so on. The present system of partial block grants with a bit of LPT and some pilot financing does not work. Nobody understands it, and nobody can fight for reform if they do not understand that. Therefore, my final call is for the establishment of a national forum on the financing of local government.