Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

I will not need that much time because I am multi-tasking today and will only make some brief points.

I am anxious to make a contribution to this legislation that was presented by the Minister yesterday as technical legislation, a minor matter so logical that it hardly requires debate. The Taoiseach had the same view on the Order of Business this morning and considered the subject so technical that it should be a matter of ministerial diktat, rather than require the scrutiny of this House.

I will focus on an aspect of this, touched on by Deputy Doyle, that causes me concern and on which I seek reassurance. On the face of it, bringing all road systems under one Ministry seems a logical thing to do but there are some difficulties with this, one of which was well rehearsed by my colleagues on the Fine Gael benches and by Deputy Ciarán Lynch yesterday. Local authorities have a wealth of experience relating to the development of county roads and the difficulty was always the lack of money to bring about such development. Local improvement schemes are a fantastic agent for dealing with roads that serve communities and families in isolated areas. The Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government's intimate knowledge of this area and its integration with the local government system makes it the obvious Department to deliver this type of small scheme.

In my experience the Department of Transport thinks on a grand scale in terms of metro and Luas systems, and motorways and smaller projects tend not to be on its list of priorities. The Department of Transport does not think in terms of boreens and small local improvement schemes nor access to individual households on the myriad of roads that exist in my county. The Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Tony Killeen, comes from a rural county like mine, but if he visited parts of south County Wexford he could well get lost. One would not wish to be lost on some of those roads because, despite the best efforts of Wexford County Council, they are not in the standard the rural community deserves. I believe that the proper home for those services is the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government.

My greatest concern, however, is a different one. In my time in the Department of the Environment I established a programme called Better Local Government — in the local government system it is sometimes referred to as the purple book. Many people subsequently sought to interview me on the detail of that book. At the core of all the reforms was the proper funding of local government. I sought to have a ring-fenced system of funding established, but it was resisted by the Department of Finance, which abhors ring-fenced funding because it sees itself as the collector general and dispenser general of the State's fund. The notion that the Oireachtas would have the temerity to ring-fence any particular source of funding for a specific purpose is something that grates on its nerves. I know how difficult it was to establish this ring-fenced funding.

My concern about this proposal, logical as it may seem and confident as I am that the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government is well intentioned in it, is that it will strike at that ring-fenced funding for local government. We will soon see that the local government fund, which is funded significantly from the proceeds of motor tax, is being re-channelled through the Department of Transport. This weakens the argument that it is a local government fund. The bulk of local government funding is from motor tax but a chunk of that will now go from the local government fund to the Department of Transport. As a vehicle for delivering a funding mechanism to local government, the basis on which the local government fund was founded in the late 1990s is thus undermined.

I alert the Minister of State to this serious concern. I seek his assurances that the basis of funding to local government will not be eroded, that this is not the thin end of the wedge that will eventually lead to a significant shift away from this ring-fenced fund for local authorities. I am deeply concerned that it may be so.

We have all seen what has happened in regard to the administration of marine policy where it was seen as logical that all marine related activities should come under the remit of one Department. That has not worked, however, and we now have a situation where part of fisheries is in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, inland fisheries are assigned to another Department and ports and port development to a third Department. It is a ludicrous way to go.

I seek the Minister of State's assurance that this provision will not undermine the local government fund. I am also concerned that this legislation will undermine the delivery at local level of strategically important but low-key programmes such as the local improvement scheme.

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