Mr. Aebhric McGibney:

I will speak on behalf of my colleagues, Ms Mary Rose Burke and Mr. Stephen Browne. I thank the committee for getting us on the shortlist. We know it has a busy agenda. We have form in this space. Dublin Chamber has been arguing around the idea of a mayor since 2000 and has been involved in previous ideas around this with the former Ministers, John Gormley and Phil Hogan. I presented to the citizens' assembly in making its deliberations. Dublin Chamber, as the committee will know, has over 1,000 companies in membership and serves the county of Dublin. It was established in 1783, so ours is one of the oldest chambers in the world. To give the committee a colour of that, among our former presidents we have had Vincent Harrison, the head of Dublin Airport, in Fingal, and Anne O'Leary, who was head of Vodafone in Sandyford and is now head of Meta, which is in the city centre, and our current president is Stephen O'Leary, who has a small business operating out of the city centre. That gives the committee the full range of companies in membership.

It is nearly 30 years since the decision to split Dublin into four "counties", which is interesting. I do not know where that word came from in terms of the Twenty-six Counties. We did not do it for the GAA and did not do it for Covid, for example. I was interested to hear the citizens' assembly speak about Dublin as a unit because that is what businesses do as well. If you are setting up a business, you ask how you get your goods out, where the port is, where the airport is, where you will get your staff and what colleges and universities are available to you. Businesses do not decide to set up here because of Trinity. They think of Trinity, UCD, Dublin City University, DCU, Technological University Dublin, TUD, and maybe even Maynooth. That is the base. They look at it from the point of view of a wider geographical area and, generally, they worry about where they will get the staff and how they will get to work. Businesses very much look at it from that perspective.

As part of our work, we study other cities to see how they work. That is where we get some of our ideas around the idea of a mayor. The main challenge here is that there is no one person, from a business point of view, who is in charge of or responsible for Dublin. That is a very hard question to answer. There are four local authorities overseen by four CEOs who work closely together - I understand that - but there does not seem to be one clear accountable person responsible for the county of Dublin. I think there are 45 Deputies in Dublin, which will go to 49, and I would say half of the constituents in each of their constituencies work, go to college, go shopping or do something else outside that area. It is a unified region. We think of it as a functional area.

We think it is important that any plebiscite should have very clear proposals attached to it. In other words, if people do not have the detail of what they are voting for, it should not go ahead until there is some sort of reasonable detail. Reading the report of the citizens' assembly, it does not seem that in the publicly available material there is a lot of detail on the rationale behind each of the functions that are broken down, whether it is education, health, the Garda or whatever else. There is a lot of work to be done there and there are many great experts involved in that work, such as Deiric Ó Broin and Jane Suiter, who could be drawn on to get that right. We recognise that the committee has a busy agenda but plead with it not to rush into voting for a plebiscite because it is important this is got right. The county of Dublin accounts for 40% of gross value added. It accounts for just under a million employees. Of those, 170,000 commute into Dublin from outside it. It accounts for half of all income tax and two thirds of all corporation tax, so it is very important that the committee gets this problem right.

What powers? We had originally talked about transport, land use, economic planning, economic development and so on. Things have moved on. In respect of water, for example, Dublin's main challenge is bringing water to Dublin, which may not be worth looking at from a Dublin water perspective. If I set the challenge in terms of the national planning framework, NPF, one of the major challenges for Dublin in achieving its targets for the framework is density in developing into brownfield sites. Who is worrying about that? City Edge, for example, which is between South Dublin County Council and Dublin City Council, is out to be completed by 2070. That is what I can see on the website. It is quite a long timeframe to be looking at housing in a crisis. We would like somebody accountable and responsible to worry about that. In construction terms, there will be major works done to provide or add energy grid capacity to the city to bring in wind and enhance the capacity of the grid. At the same time there will hopefully be more housing construction and possibly construction of a metro.

Who will bring all those pieces together to make sure people can still get around and get to where they need to go? For us, it is really important there is someone there to join the dots. The closest I can come to who is responsible is the metropolitan area strategic plan, MASP, which has not quite the same definition; it is slightly different. That is under the Eastern and Midland Regional Assembly. The last public information I can find on that is three pages of things dating to 2021. In terms of urgency, then, it does not seem to have that kind of weight or importance that we think it should have. When Limerick voted for their paper, they talked about having a mayor to mobilise, with a mandate and a means. The citizens' assembly in Dublin talked about having the power to convene and consult, to bring people together and to make things happen across the divide. We think that is very important and would focus on that as the first part of what needs to be done.

Lastly, if this does not happen, if we do not end up having a vote for a directly elected mayor, perhaps a Cabinet Minister with responsibility for Dublin or for urban areas might be appropriate. They would be able to convene and bring together people to resolve issues in the shaping of things as they move forward.