Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Mark Daly for the invite to speak on behalf of Sinn Féin. This is one of the few instances where we will get a huge level of agreement. We all know the history of local government and for the most part it has been very positive. I agree with the Minister of State in the sense that if we go back to 2014 and the changes that were made, such as the taking away from the town councils, a huge amount of that was really about austerity and cutting back resources in local authorities. In the likes of Drogheda Borough Council, Dundalk Town Council and even Ardee Town Council, decisions were made on the basis of what made sense in those urban areas and that is something that has definitely been lost. I was co-opted on 18 September 2017 and then elected to the council in 2019 so I did not spend a huge amount of time on it. However, I have been engaged with Sinn Féin for longer than I would like to or even can remember at this stage and I remember the great ideas I used to have for if I was a councillor. I always use the example of Councillor Kevin Meenan who was elected in 1999. He would tell me about what he could get done in 1999 as a town councillor in Dundalk compared to what he can get done as a county councillor with six other colleagues alongside him; it does not compare. This has been said if we are talking about housing and housing maintenance. You deal with the guys who deal specifically with this. They are generally trying their best but there is an element of robbing Peter to pay Paul just to get regular stuff done that was able to be done before. We look at the retrofit scheme as a means of dealing with the fact that people cannot get windows and doors replaced when they want to or need to. For a period, Louth County Council had a good history in respect of the retrofit scheme. I think 205 council houses were retrofitted last year but the target for this year is 145. Before this, we were able to take resources from other councils that did not have the capacity or whatever. However, again, that is some of that short-term thinking.

I have a particular issue in Louth County Council at the minute. We all talk about these pacts. Again, these are really about sharing out positions. The same Kevin Meenan as our group leader went to the other parties regarding operating the D'Hondt system and including everybody. I will be honest; it was thrown back in our faces. I could blame every councillor who agreed to go against what was open democracy but the fact is it was probably a small number of councillors. Everyone else has a responsibility for agreeing with it. I do not intend to make a major point about it but it is not necessarily best practice. However, we all know the real issue when talking about local authorities is that all the powers lies with the executive team and the chief executive. I am not saying they always make the wrong decisions but sometimes I wonder what councillors are there for outside of talking to themselves, occasionally releasing press releases and even at times having conversations regarding planning where they do not necessarily have any powers. The same goes for TDs. At this stage, a huge number of us hate when somebody comes to us with a planning application. That is not to take away from the planners and the work they do. None of us see that the planning Bill and the local development plans that have gone into place do anything other than remove any element of consistency and just leave everything open from a point of view of court cases being taken. Many planners talk about the fact that one part of a development plan or of the planning Bill contradicts another part. The only people who will like to see this are probably solicitors and barristers at some point and we will have more chaos in the planning system. The real problem is that people out there who are looking to get houses built, even one-off housing, are saying there is absolutely no consistency whatsoever.

There is no shortage to the issues we need to deal with. We need to look at the fact that we have a drop in turnout. We know there are issues around democracy in general that we need to deal with such as big tech, the cesspit that is social media and the way algorithms work. However, we really need to get down to providing real powers to local authorities again. We have a situation here, and I am hardly the first person to have said it, that the Dáil is the biggest city, town or county council in this State.

It is an absolute farce. I will also bring up an issue regarding Irish Water. The people of Dundalk are sending pictures showing the brown water coming out of their taps to me and to others. I realise that is down to a high level of manganese but we all know the difficulties councillors have when trying to engage on this. I have had decent enough engagement with Irish Water in the past while. Why is that? It is because I was able to bring the issue up on the floor of the Dáil. That is hardly the best way to deal with these issues. There are pilot projects ongoing with a view to delivering a solution to the manganese issue. We will only know at the end of the summer whether these projects have worked so we are talking about 2026 for a solution. I am fairly sure most county councillors in Louth County Council do not realise that so I am using this occasion to put it on the record.

I could go on for a considerable time but the big deal is the fact that local authorities have insufficient powers. We need to get real. What we are attempting to do in the Limerick mayoral project is a step in the right direction but we have a hell of a lot more work to do. There is no point in talking about this issue around the Houses if it does not actually go somewhere.