Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

Although the business community is creative, entrepreneurial and dynamic, and I fully agree that such energy should be harnessed and local authorities have not necessarily been to the fore traditionally in capturing it, I am concerned at the manner in which the Minister is bringing forward legislation in the House today, the third last sitting day of the session. Rushed legislation is almost inevitably flawed. We must now go back and revisit the A case legislation from six months ago. The concerns about which I argued then are now all being reiterated by the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy McDowell. No doubt if the Minister, Deputy Roche, railroads this legislation through today or tomorrow, we will have to revisit it.

Not only is this complex legislation being hammered through today, but the Minister is also throwing in some important amendments to the existing rates legislation. It is a great deal to ask that we shove this through within the next 45 minutes. It is not the right way. Frankly, it is disrespectful to the House. This is not the way to put it through the House.

On a wider issue, the organisations that are behind this Bill are worthy ones and have a significant amount of creative energy to add. The Dublin City Business Association, through Mr. Tom Coffey, has added enormously to the debate about Dublin city. I recall that ten or 15 years ago Tom gave me a copy of Richard Rogers's A New London, which contained a considerable number of great ideas about the city. Chambers Ireland has also added to the discussion on accountability and the need for districts to be responsible. That is all useful.

Behind all this is my gut conviction that local authorities should be dealing well with these activities and I am very nervous about a bolt-on strategy to the existing local authority system. There are perhaps two elephants in the corner in this regard. The first is the Minister's denial of the adequate funding that local authorities should receive. He is not providing it. The second is the inflexibility of local authorities, whether that is due to inherited work practices or simply an inability to be dynamic and to respond to changing ideas and needs. I passionately believe that local authorities should be to the forefront of change and we need to make them work well rather than clamp an extra framework onto them that, ironically, will make them more bureaucratic.

If something needs to be fixed within local authorities, let us fix it but let us not simply add another layer to a process that is remarkably murky at present due to the changes that have been put upon the local authority system over the past ten years. The strategy policy committees are difficult for the outsider to comprehend but if one thinks they are bad, the addition of business improvement districts will make it even more difficult to comprehend what is happening.

I am also nervous of the examples that have been chosen. Business improvement districts appear to be popular, both in the UK and the United States. Frankly, our towns are not like Philadelphia, midtown Manhattan, Nottingham or Birmingham. We are lucky enough to have inherited strong town centres, although these are under threat from out of town shopping due the changes wrought by the Minister whereby he opened the stable door to allow development elsewhere, whether on the Ballymun Road with IKEA or in getting rid of the cap on the size of shopping centres. The Minister did something similar to what Margaret Thatcher did 20 years ago when he essentially gave carte blanche for development to take place outside the traditional town centres. That was a retrograde step.

Returning to the kind of issues that will be undertaken by business improvement districts and their boards, it is crucially important that we get right issues such as street cleaning, street furniture, signage and special lighting. Mr. Dick Gleeson, the chief planner in Dublin City Council, has referred to the public space of the city as being the living room. That is a good comparison to draw. When one looks at the floor as the footpath or pavement and the walls as the buildings, it is important that we get it right. In Ireland, we went through a particularly bad phase over the past 30 years when we allowed second best to suffice. The paving of Grafton Street with concrete bricks was a retrograde step.

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