Dr. Michael Clark:

It is truly an honour to sit in this beautiful Chamber and I am very grateful to the Chair and the committee for undertaking this very important work. With the local and European election campaigns in full swing across the country, the efforts of this committee to recognise the vital importance of these two non-Oireachtas exercises in democracy are particularly necessary, and I am sure there will also be other elections in the next 12 months.

I am particularly gratified to follow Councillor Dermot Lacey. We served together on the UCD governing authority, another type of body that councillors are no longer members of. That has also happened in very recent times.

I also echo what he said about area committee chairpersons. In my five years as a councillor, the hardest job I had was as chairperson of the Dún Laoghaire area committee, with many long meetings dealing with SHDs week after week, two meetings a month, with extensive bureaucratic challenges associated with those. There is no recognition, no remuneration and no respect given to those in the Dublin area.

As outlined in my submission, I would like to concentrate on three particular issues: the imbalance of powers and functions whereby councillors are all too often subservient to the council’s executive; councillors’ own failure to rigorously enforce standing orders; and the increasingly impossible demands on councillors’ time for what is, officially at least, a part-time role but with full-time expectations from our citizens.

Regarding councillor-executive interactions, the vast majority of interactions I have had with officials have been cordial, professional and respectful. However, I have noticed periodically an almost impatient disrespect shown by the executive to democratically reached decisions by councils and especially area committee meetings. I acknowledge that there is a delineation between executive and councillor functions but it would be absolutely intolerable in a private business for executives to effectively ignore the recommendations or directions from the company board on certain key decisions. The public are understandably frustrated when their elected representatives are seemingly powerless to effect changes to council actions. Inevitably that breeds a certain cynicism among those citizens because they see there is no way to affect the decisions of the council.

In many councils across Ireland, there is an inherent asymmetry. There is no way to hold the executive truly accountable. We can complain, we can formally object, we can occasionally direct via various section motions, but we can rarely control what is actually in our council chamber.

That brings me to my second point, something for which we councillors cannot blame anybody else, and that is how we run our own meetings. As someone who is not always a paragon of brevity myself, we are not always the best at following our own standing orders. We are not always the best at enforcing the various rules and procedures within our own council bodies. I would urge cathaoirligh to restrain the speaking times of councillors and, more importantly, officials when we have a very restricted agenda, generally dominated by officials' business rather than councillors' business.

Finally, it is becoming increasingly impossible to find the time to properly discharge the duties of a councillor, particularly while maintaining a day job. I thank my employer and my teaching colleagues for facilitating my day here in the Seanad Chamber. Taking meetings alone, councillors are required to attend council, area committee and strategic policy committee meetings every month. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg as certain councillors are nominated to numerous outside bodies with multiple meetings per year. I am a member of numerous council subcommittees. I serve on an education and training board, on five governing boards of management, on two audit and risk committees and am constantly hounded to participate on interview boards. That schedule of meetings is just incompatible with a full-time job. I acknowledge that, as a secondary school teacher, I have wonderful holidays in the summer, but I have relatively little flexibility during the school year and school day.

The Moorhead report did not match the expectations of councillors and certainly did not allow councillors to take on that big decision to embrace politics full time. I appreciate the public might be reluctant to create more full-time politicians but a crisis point approaches.

This committee has already heard that other comparable countries have a much lower citizen-councillor ratio than Ireland does. We must either reduce our demands and expectations of part-time councillors or else invest in full-time professional councillors. These hard decisions will underpin the democratic legitimacy of local government in the future.