Shane Cassells (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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I will turn to Mr. Lemass while he is here. I know the witnesses will return in March and I look forward to that. This matter is very important. The Association of Irish Local Government, AILG, was before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government last November. The witnesses may have been there as well. One of the key tenets of its presentation that day was the matter of commercial rates and the over-dependence of local government on this as an income strand. It indicated that over a period, especially over the past number of decades, local government has become massively overly dependent on those rates. Commercial rates accounted for 37% of overall local authority income in 2016. As I stated, that comes in at €1.5 billion.

There was a period during the crash when councils were trying to freeze rates to give people a chance when they were going out of business. Last year, for the first time, all the main cities - with the possible exception of Dublin - started to increase rates, and in some cases the increase was substantial. Some increased the rate by approximately 5%. As a result of the butchery of town councils, we now have an ongoing equalisation process. Towns that traditionally had a lower rate than the county are now being forced to put up their rates to match the county rate. Those people are getting hit twice.

Is there an acceptance by the Department that the revaluation process is having an exceptional impact on small and medium sized businesses, which still form the bedrock of employment in this country outside this city? Is the matter of commercial rates going to be addressed separately outside this revaluation process?