Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

However, by the underhanded means by which the local authorities effect this wholesale privatisation of services, the management companies are foisted on the householders and a new local tax is levied. This is a significant inequity because in neighbouring estates built a few years earlier that may include a "millionaires row", services from the local authorities are provided through general taxation, as should be the case.

It is also a scam because the directors of the management companies for up to the first five years are the developers who built the estates, sold the houses and made massive profits from the new young house owners who, before these management companies were foisted on them, would have had developers maintain these basic services for a period of years until the estate was taken in charge by the local authorities. They are now dragging householders to court, demanding money from them and scaring them with intimidating letters from debt collectors. If these management companies were mooted in the 1960s, the mohair suited developers who financed Fianna Fáil would have thought it a Tacateer heaven but they would not have dared implement it.

It is a major instance of a new rip-off and inequity. A revolt will begin because these scare tactics make the reality obvious. Is privatising pubic services in this way and putting a new local tax on hard-pressed taxpayers a conscious Government policy? During an adjournment debate Deputy Noel Ahern, the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, and known to the Taoiseach, told Deputy Catherine Murphy that the general matters administered by management companies were never the responsibility of local authorities. In fact, all these services were the responsibility of local authorities. Will the Taoiseach ask the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government to immediately conduct an investigation? Will he also demand that local authorities desist from this practice and abolish the existing management companies that are the source of this inequity?

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