Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Cathaoirleach for the opportunity to speak on behalf of People Before Profit. Local authorities are chronically under-resourced and underfunded and are having their powers stripped away from them systematically and on an ongoing basis through underfunding, outsourcing and backdoor privatisation to the point where they are becoming increasingly irrelevant when it comes to doing the things that ordinary people in the areas they serve would expect them to do. That is producing a great deal of justified anger. Most of us would have been out canvassing recently. What are the issues that people are bringing up? Housing, most obviously. They look to the local authorities to provide them with housing. Their kids are on housing lists or are being thrown off those lists because they earn a little too much and there is nothing for them, but they cannot afford to live in their own localities. Housing maintenance takes forever or does not get done. The crews are understaffed and under-resourced. The maintenance of local estates is not looked after. Roads and paths are in a desperate state of repair. People who are in wheelchairs have significant problems navigating paths and roads because they are not properly maintained.

Local authorities used to look after waste. They no longer do so because waste collection was privatised. People pay a fortune for it. There are multiple providers. There is fly-tipping everywhere. The environmental situation has got worse since the privatisation of waste collection. Now, there is nobody to go to because there are only private waste operators, some of which are registered offshore in tax havens.

I speak to water workers about water services. They do not want to go to Uisce Éireann. They have all the knowledge about how to fix the leaks and so on and they do not want to work in water services anymore. Irish Water was a vehicle to try to privatise. The Government did not fully succeed in privatising, although, in reality, much of Irish Water's work is done by private contractors. The knowledge that we used to have in the local authorities has effectively disappeared.

I met the firefighters who were called in for the Stardust fire. The first thing they wanted to talk about was the lack of fire cover that we have and the potential for disasters like the Stardust to happen again because of the lack of resourcing for fire services. It is pretty incredible.

These are things that we are all aware of and that have been getting steadily worse. The forces that are doing this to local government have been accelerating. If this committee is serious about re-empowering local government, then it has quite a job on its hands. Essentially, we have to reverse the entire trajectory of what has been happening in local government and local services for the past 20 or 30 years. It starts with funding. In France, 40% of all public spending goes through local government. Here, the figure is 7%. That is a joke. Local government simply does not have the resources to do the things it is required to do.

We have the local property tax, which was a gimmick to pretend we were going to try to address the funding of local authorities by imposing a tax on people's family homes, which really just added to the sense of grievance that people had because, of course, the imposition of that tax did not lead to any additional funding whatsoever for local government. It never could, because the proportion of income that is provided by the local property tax is just 7%. Even if it was ratcheted up to levels that would be really annoying for people who are landed with this tax, it would never be possible make up the funding difference necessary to do all the things that local authorities need to do in the context of housing, housing maintenance and estate repairs.

Sports facilities is another area. People are crying out for football pitches. Now that women's sport has expanded, we need extra changing facilities for women and so on. There is a chronic deficit in all of these areas.

We have to start by demanding proper funding of local government. Let us do away with the pretence that the local property tax is a method to fund local government. Let us reverse the trend towards privatisation and outsourcing of council services. I do not know who mentioned recruiting apprentices and tradespeople. I was talking to maintenance workers in our Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown maintenance department when I was out canvassing the other day. They said they have about half of the tradespeople and general operatives they need to physically do the job. We need to recruit apprentices and tradespeople again. We need to take waste and water services back into municipal ownership. We should stop outsourcing housing to approved housing bodies, the Land Development Agency and so on, and actually give funding to local authorities to deliver social and affordable housing.