Pat Casey (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome everybody. It has been interesting, but I do not think we learned anything new this morning, that we did not hear about already throughout our consultation process. We did not hear about any silver bullets to solidly fix the situation. There were snippets of some. The key problem with local government is its financing. Without financing you can have all the powers you like, but if you do not have the money to back it up there is not a whole lot you can do. The issues are the centralisation of powers and support for our councillors. The latter is an issue that needs immediate addressing, whether with regard to providing legal advice or with budgetary process. We need to provide more for them in those areas. I will hit on one or two specific points. Senator Higgins mentioned the county development plan. I agree that a fundamental role of the councillor is the adoption of the county development plan. I am split on the issue of six or ten years. I served three terms as a councillor. I was there for the adoption of three county development plans, but I only saw one through its complete process. When I was first elected in 2004, my first meeting was the adoption of the county development plan. Back then, we were landed with volumes of documents to read before we adopted it. The next one I was there from start to finish, and the last was across the election process again. The practicality on the ground is clearly not working either. I would love to see implementation of a county development plan, even if that implementation was a six-year implementation of a ten-year plan that was reviewed every so often.

I am afraid the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, is on a solo run today with regard to the town councils, as was his colleague, Deputy Phelan. There is clear evidence from every presentation we have, that while town councils needed reform they did not need to be abolished. Another thing that came up was the establishment of town teams. The way town teams are working is that they almost have more powers and access to the officials than the council members have. There are the PPNs and the LCDC. I was there for the creation of the LCDC, which was one of the most bureaucratic structures you could put together. I believe in local democracy. We need to do something. We cannot do that without the main parties and main people onboard. The research that the Library and Research Service did for us is a fantastic piece of work. I think the rapporteur will agree that we need to develop that and bring forward solid solutions that we can present to the leaders of all groupings. They will maybe then buy into that. I thank everybody for their presentations. I did not get to address every one of them. I give Phil Hogan good credit. He sold the LPT as a brand-new tax when it was only replacing existing funding. He did well on that one.