Dr. Mark Callanan:

I thank the Cathaoirleach and the Members of Seanad Éireann for the kind invitation to attend today's public hearing on the future of local democracy. I am here as a former member, between 2011 and 2018, of the Council of Europe's group of independent experts on local self-government. To be clear, I am speaking in a personal capacity and not on behalf of my employer or any other organisation.

I have been interested to follow the debate thus far, both today and listening back to previous sessions. From my perspective, we look back at decades of multiple programmes for Government, White Papers, Green Papers and action programmes published by governments composed of different political parties. When we reflect on local government reform initiatives in other parts of Europe and further afield, several enduring themes regularly arise in debates over local government reform. Primary among these is getting the right structures, including debates over reconfiguration of boundaries in local government. In the Irish context, this happened most recently in 2014 with the establishment of municipal districts, the merger of some local authorities and the reconfiguration of regional structures.

Second, we have mentioned the powers of local government, particularly the portfolio of services delivered through the local government system, and related debates over devolution of powers. Third is the relationship between national and local government, and how local authorities are involved in national decisions that will affect their operations, including new legislation. As Dr. Quinn has mentioned, we are appropriately in Leinster House to touch on that.

Fourth, is the internal decision-making arrangements within local government and the balance of powers between elected officeholders and appointed officials. That is a debate everywhere. Fifth is the financing of government and especially possible changes to sources of revenue. I will add a new one, based on the Seanad's own debates, and which has arguably become more pressing in recent decades. That is the status of elected representatives supporting councillors in their roles and the more generally hostile environment that elected representatives at all levels encounter in modern democracies.

Looking at the official record it seems many of these themes have been reflected in the discussions. I will therefore reserve my opening remarks to a key theme which I consider to be central, namely, the devolution of powers and functions of local government. As has been mentioned in previous meetings, comparison with other jurisdictions illustrates that, compared with Ireland, many public services delivered at local level in Europe and North America through the local government system are not delivered through local government here. This point was also made in the Council of Europe's 2023 monitoring report, which argued that Ireland is in breach of Articles 3.1 and 4.3 of the European charter. These state that local authorities should be responsible for a substantial share of public affairs and that public responsibilities shall generally be exercised by those authorities closest to the citizen. The monitoring report conceded that new powers had been devolved to local government in areas like economic development and climate change.

Since the 1990s, there has also been a recurring emphasis on local government playing a co-ordinating role in the provision of public services locally. International research suggests that while that co-ordination role can be important, to fulfil it local government must have substantive functional responsibilities. As this forum has already noted, other powers previously exercised by local government in Ireland have also been taken and transferred to national bodies. None of this is to downplay the fantastic work local authorities do across a range of often undervalued services every day, through social housing and housing supports, spatial planning, urban renewal, road maintenance, recycling centres, public libraries, the fire service, Civil Defence, parks, playgrounds and the arts and through support to hundreds of local festivals every year. That is a long list, and I am leaving out a lot. This is to make the point that the record suggests more could be done at local level.

The unfortunate tone of the most recent reform initiative, Putting People First, in 2012 and earlier documents like the Green Paper on local government in 2008, was that there was a need to improve the level of confidence in the local government system, so it could take on wider functions. These documents suggested that local government needed to show it could embrace the challenge of taking on new tasks. It has now been a decade since these documents were published, and local government has shown it can step up, taking on new challenges in areas like climate action, economic development and enterprise support, leading the co-ordination of supports to vulnerable groups during the Covid-19 pandemic and leading in the provision of supports following the invasion of Ukraine. Local government can therefore point to a record of success in delivering on these new challenges over the past decade. It is perhaps time to be positive and use these examples as a basis to revisit the argument and show local government has repositioned itself and has the capacity to take on a wider role.

On the more positive side, the Council of Europe's monitoring report commented that local authorities have a strong connection with their citizens.

It added that they use a variety of means of local participation and, for those services they currently provide, do so to a high standard. Nonetheless, the report also suggests as part of its recommendations that additional functions be transferred to local authorities, that the principle of subsidiarity should be properly reflected and protected in primary legislation and that more formal and regular mechanisms to consult local government in advance of taking national decisions and adopting legislation be developed.

I thank the Cathaoirleach again for the opportunity to speak again today. I look forward to the rest of the discussion and the results emerging from this forum.