Shane Cassells (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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The Comptroller and Auditor General speaks about technicalities and established principles in terms of the distribution of the funds and fairness. The model that exists for the local property tax was premised on the old model of the block grant on the basis the Department stated no council would be any worse off than it was. The problem is the model that was in existence was broken to begin with because assessment of towns and counties in terms of the allocation of block grant money did not keep pace with the population explosion that happened, particularly in the commuter counties of Meath and Kildare. We had extremely large towns on the east coast getting less funding than some smaller towns in peripheral areas in the south of the country because the Department's model did not keep pace. When there was a transition to the local property tax model, it did not reflect the change of the population structure of the country. This is where the inherent unfairness existed in how the Department funded local authorities.