Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Independent)

It is with a heavy heart that I speak on the Local Government (Mayor and Regional Authority of Dublin) Bill because I find it impossible to support the Bill in its present format. The fundamental lesson I learned from more than 12 years on Dublin City Council is that the city and county managers system must be abolished. It is impossible to have democratic and efficient local government without democratically elected leaders with a clear mandate at local level. As the Minister, Deputy Gormley, well knows, I have repeatedly proposed a Dublin regional mayor elected by and answerable to all the people of the greater Dublin region. I believe that similar democratic, decentralised and regional leadership should be established for Cork and Munster, Galway and Connacht, south Leinster and our three Ulster counties, with the latter increasingly integrating with the rest of Ulster as the two Irish administrations move closer together.

I led the Labour Party and Rainbow Civic Alliance on Dublin City Council for approximately eight years and I always articulated the idea of a directly elected mayor and strong local administration focusing on the needs of the Dublin region. The Dublin region is the critical economic and social dynamo for the entire State, but greater Dublin is a great region and deserves a great mayor, its own leader. Members should think of the iconic past and present mayors, both famous and notorious, who have led and promoted similar great cities throughout the world, including Ken Livingstone of London, Willy Brandt of West Berlin, Richard Daley of Chicago, Yuri Luzhkov of Moscow, Michael Bloomberg of New York and Joan Clos i Matheu of Barcelona. In all of those cities the buck stops with the mayor as even the great Ken Livingstone found out in the last London mayoral elections. Unlike the barren, bureaucratic stagnation presided over by successive city and county managers, those cities have been often blessed with dynamic democratically elected leaders with impressive achievements in planning and design, housing, public transport, water and waste facilities and other key urban services.

The legislation the Minister, Deputy Gormley, has produced, however, will simply not deliver a mayor that can achieve similar results because this legislation is grossly deficient. As a former colleague of the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Gormley, on Dublin City Council, I am very disappointed to see the totally watered down proposal for Dublin mayor that the Minister has presented to the House.

A key governance issue for Dubliners and the Dublin region is its sheer size compared with the rest of Ireland. Quite clearly an elected mayor with real and significant power will create a new major power centre, as is the case in London, Barcelona and Moscow, which could and will rival the power of the national government. For that reason Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been always bitterly opposed to real devolved government in Dublin. Thus it was no surprise to me that Deputy Hogan opposed the office of the Dublin mayor from the word go and other Deputies, including Deputy Creighton, are fiercely opposed to it. Likewise Fianna Fáil will not tolerate a strong and viable Dublin mayoralty and prefers, as Professor Damien Kiberd famously expressed it years ago, that Dublin should remain a "centre dominated by a periphery" unlike all of the other great cities of the EU. As I have always been conscious of the vicious bias against the greater Dublin region of the two conservative parties, I believe a new office of the Dublin mayor might be placed in the context of strong regional government for the entire Republic. The federal model of Austria with its large capital Vienna and eight other states and regions might be a useful exemplar.

It is surprising and shocking, however, that the Green Party and the Minister, Deputy Gormley, would acquiesce with the anti-democratic agenda of the two conservative parties and provide the people of Dublin with little more than an empty suit. It is clear that the Minister knows the writing is on the wall for himself and his utterly discredited Green Party and is now desperately scrambling around for anything to shore up its devastated reputation before it departs the Irish political scene forever.

The core of the Bill is the section on the powers and responsibilities with which the Dublin mayor would be mandated under this legislation. I welcome the role given to the mayor under Part 3, Chapter 2 on waste management plans and under Part 3, Chapter 3 on bringing forward a new water services strategic plan for the Dublin region, for example. I also believe the power of the mayor to direct a local authority in Part 3, section 1, that it is not acting in accordance with a regional planning guideline is positive.

Overall, however, there are major and insuperable deficiencies in the type of mayoral system the Minister, Deputy Gormley, proposes under this legislation. The mayoralty that the Minister wants to establish will be able to make endless recommendations and comments on central and local government policies, but it is clear the elected mayor will have little or no real power to make life and the city work better for all residents of the Dublin region. I passionately believe the creation of an effective office of Dublin mayor is a critical necessity for the revival and reinvigoration of the Republic, but the legislation does not give us such an office.

Part 4, Chapter 2 of the Bill deals with transport, which is one of the most critical policy areas for the mayor of any city. Transport and traffic matters need a clear overarching directly elected official who has the power to knock heads together and get things done and the city moving. As a former transport spokesperson, I invigilated the legislation establishing the Dublin Transport Authority and National Transport Authority on behalf of the Labour Party. It was intimated through all of those debates that the new Dublin mayor would be the chairperson of the Dublin Transport Authority and hold a powerful traffic and transport Czar-type role like the mayor of London. Yet, the Minister's proposed mayor will now merely be the head of a 12-person greater Dublin area transport council to make recommendations on transport and traffic matters in the greater Dublin area. Ultimate power under this legislation for transport matters still rests with the unelected National Transport Authority rather than with a mayor who answers directly to the people of Dublin. During the debate on the Dublin Transport Authority Bill, I submitted a number of amendments on behalf of the Labour Party that would have facilitated the direct election of members of the DTA board by the people of the greater Dublin area. Unfortunately, the Minister for Transport, Deputy Dempsey, and all of his Fianna Fáil and Green colleagues voted me down.

Similarly, the mayor's proposed role under Part 4, Chapter 1, on housing issues is exceptionally poor. The Bill allows only for the regional authority to make recommendations to the four local authorities in terms of their housing policies. The Minister, Deputy Gormley, should know there is an unprecedented housing crisis across the Dublin region in terms of homelessness and there are perhaps up to 50,000 individuals and families on social housing lists even though there are approximately 2,000 empty apartments in my constituency. Why can the mayor not be given the lead role to direct housing policy and sort out the unacceptable homeless and waiting list situation once and for all?

The Bill as proposed is therefore a near-total sell-out by the Minister, Deputy Gormley, and once again unfortunately in this Government, the Greens have turned yellow. For example, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government of the day appears to be able to overrule the mayor on practically every single issue if he or she so wishes. It is depressing that the Minister, Deputy Gormley, of all people would go along with the creation of a mayor for Dublin that could end up being so weak, pliable and ineffective.

The most ridiculous document that was produced in the recent debate on the Dublin mayoralty was produced by officials of Fingal County Council. The document seems to have been the basis for Deputy Hogan's ludicrous statement referring to an €8 million figure for the essential costs of the office. That document also had the brass neck to state that "the vesting of such incredible authority in a single individual as is proposed in the new mayoral proposals is without precedent in the State." Of course the direct opposite is true. There are many such precedents and they include the offices of city and county managers established under the 1929 legislation which copied US law when it was felt best that apparatchik-type business leaders should run local government without the messy involvement of the people.

The cost of running the mayoral office in terms of the salary of the mayor and the financing of the regional authority, for example, is outlined in Chapter 2 of Part 1. The mayor and the authority will be funded primarily through the budgets of the four local authorities involved, Dublin City Council, Fingal County Council, South Dublin County Council and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. Yet all of the local authorities are already under severe financial pressure to provide even some of their most basic services to local residents. Will Dublin residents face even more cutbacks to their local services because of the funding model the Minister, Deputy Gormley, is imposing?

The Minister should have introduced a self-financing, cost-neutral model for financing the mayor. In my own original mayoral proposals, which I made a number of years ago, I called for a review of the more than 50 directors of services and senior executive manager positions across the local authorities, which needs to be greatly streamlined. I also strongly believe that the profoundly anti-democratic city and county manager positions should be abolished and the savings on both of these reforms used to fund a truly democratic elected mayoral-led local government system. The administration of each of the four counties could be simply headed by the senior director of services concerned.

One of the key problems with the Bill is the lack of an all-Dublin assembly, unlike the local assemblies of the other great cities I mentioned earlier. I am a former member not only of Dublin City Council, but also of the Dublin Regional Authority. That the members of the new authority are indirectly elected is a serious weakness of the Minister's model in contrast with the London Assembly. Why not simply make the mayor answerable to all 127 councillors of the four Dublin counties meeting as one body perhaps four to six times per year? No extra costly structure would be necessary with such an arrangement and all elected Dublin councillors would have a fundamental role in approving the mayor's strategic plans and policies.

I come from the rural part of south Dublin outside Clondalkin. I represented Coolock-Artane and Donaghmede-Raheny on Dublin City Council for 12 years, where I was the leader of the council. I live in Fingal and have many relatives in Dún Laoghaire Rathdown. I would passionately favour strong regional autonomy for Dublin, at least analogous to that of London, Paris or Barcelona. Indeed, that Dublin requires some form of autonomy is my firm view after nearly 20 years in representative politics. I and the Labour Party are strongly committed to making the administration of the Dublin region more democratic, effective and responsive. For those reasons I cannot support the Bill.

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