Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have done it in the past. I will touch on a few issues. We talk about local government or local administration. We do not have local government; we have local administration at best. We had the local elections earlier this month and filled 949 council seats. As a reminder, Fianna Fáil won 248, Sinn Féin 102, Fine Gael 245, the Green Party 23, the Labour Party 56, the Social Democrats 35, People Before Profit-Solidarity 13, Aontú 8 and Independents 186. I said the latter figure with a louder intonation because I will return to it in a minute. There is then a group called "Others". I am not going to spend too much time teasing all that out, but there are 33 councillors in that group. I am making this point because in the last few days, we have seen tribalism at its best in our 31 council chambers. We have seen the divvying-up of chains, chairs and positions, especially paid positions and I challenge the Ministers of State on that because it is simply not good enough. There has to be a scenario in which every one of the 949 elected members has a legitimate mandate to serve his or her community and the people he or she represents, subject of course to being in compliance with the law and having respect for diversity and difference.

We have constitutional provision for local government and we do not use that enough. That is an important point. We must have fairness and respect. Let us have an end to the tribalism because tribalism can go on. The majority of Members of the Seanad are elected by councillors and you cannot rock up in six months' time and look for votes from certain sectors of this group if you are not going to be supportive of and consistent with them. The challenge for this committee and, more important, the Ministers of State is to ensure we have fairness and equal distribution and that all political groups in the council chambers are represented in the corporate policy group, CPG. Those who know anything about local government will be aware that a person must be a chair of a strategic policy committee to be on the CPG. The CPG is very significant within the functions of the local authority. A very enlightened chief executive in Westmeath County Council extended an invitation to all members who were not represented on the CPG. The members in question did not have voting rights. The Ministers of State should look at that option. Let let us not exclude people from the process. Let us include them.

We need more devolved powers. We can come in here and talk ad nauseam about local government, but what is this report going to do? What are we going to do? Are we going to ask the political parties to consider incorporating local government reform in their manifestos? We have that anyway. We do not need this committee to do that. Each party has its own mechanisms and systems and I would like to think there was some decency or democracy within that which provided for it. That is not a runner as far as I am concerned. We must approach it more strongly than that by appealing directly to central government as regards where we are going to see devolved government. We need to devolve powers.

Why am I reading every week that the Minister is giving funding of €35,000 to a local authority? Every few weeks on gov.ie, there are all these announcements of funding to local authorities. Why are local authorities going back for all sorts of approval? Everything is centralised. There are the great announcements, the Ministers cutting ribbons and opening roads all over the country and the sports capital grants. There are queues and queues of people. Everyone wants to announce it. Let us empower elected councillors to get on with the job. Unfortunately, central government and politicians in Dáil Éireann want to keep government centralised so that they are giving out the goodies. We are going to see it in the run-up to the election. We are going to see loads of money dished out. Using taxpayers' money to convince them to vote for the Government is not proper democracy.

I have always been a strong advocate for sitting county councillors. Let us support and resource them.

A number of councillors who presented to this committee have not been re-elected. A number of councillors who have presented to this committee in recent months chose to leave local government, and we need to understand why.

I thank the committee and the Chair for facilitating dialogue and discussion. We need a strong recommendation for how we are going to support our city and county councillors, and we need a charter and a commitment for the next Government as to how it will set out a schedule and a timeframe for devolving more powers, subsidiarity at its best, to our local communities and our local elected representatives.