Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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I want to make a couple of points and we can be very discursive. I want to comment on the strong point that Deputy Harkin made on representative democracy, participative democracy and consultation. My experience is that people argue and, as the point has been made by the Cathaoirleach, when they seek consultation they mean "accept my view". It is not consultation; it is "Accept my view. I object to this. I do not want this to happen". If you do not accept their view the consultation is a failure but that is not what consultation is. There must be a decision-making process. As Dr. Cohen said, one of the frustrations is endless bureaucracy and endless talking about things because people do not want to make a decision. We see this again and again and it is more difficult at local authority level because it is more intimate than it is the Dáil. Politicians may get 200 emails. While this is not that many from among the general electorate, it particularly impacts on politicians at local level. I have always admired people who listen to people arguing for their position and then make a decision, as opposed to somebody who is afraid to make a decision for fear of offending somebody and affecting their electorate. It is a real issue.

Many moons ago as Minister for the environment I produced a document on better local government. It was an effort to involve communities in local authority decision making. The structure I devised at the time was to have strategic policy committees chaired by an elected member but with participants of the sector of the community interested in that particular policy, for example, local housing associations would be on housing committees and local art centres and local theatre groups would be on culture committees. They would collectively be involved in the decision making. This has never been implemented, which is a regret. I hope there will be a review of local government and we go back to this. The idea in the document was to have a director of service who would help the strategic policy committee and its chair in the same way as a chief executive of a board. The policy would be presented to the monthly meeting by the chair of the committee. This does not happen. The directors of service do the presentations. The democratic side was never fully developed. Dr. Cohen may well agree with me that this re-empowerment of the elected side of local democracy is very important.

The final, less positive point I would make is that it suits many members that this is the situation and that they are not the ones leading the policy because then they can decry the policy if they think it might impact on them negatively electorally. These are the vagaries of democracy that we have to live with. As the old adage has it, what is worse than democracy is everything else. We need to perfect it all of the time. We have tried it through freedom of information legislation, the registering of lobbyists, and knowing what is happening in a democracy but reform of our democratic systems should be permanently on our agenda.