Finian McGrath (Dublin North Central, Independent)

I will share my time with Deputy Boyd Barrett. I thank the Chair for the opportunity to speak on this legislation, the Local Authority Public Administration Bill. I welcome this Bill, but it is also important to have a broader debate on local government and general reform in public and political life. The bottom line must always be quality of service for our citizens and our taxpayers. That is not happening currently. I feel strongly about this and will support the legislation. This Bill is also a glorious opportunity for a genuine start to local government reform. Leaving things as they are is not an option. This debate is not all about public representation, it is also about delivering to our citizens and about their rights to access to public services.

I am a little disappointed that the Minister has seen fit to reject the Bill from the start. This is bad for our councils, council staff and people on the ground. Reform is all about change. It is about changing the mindset at local government level. We were all elected in the recent general election and the vast majority of Members put Dáil reform on their agenda as a priority. The Government got elected on the mandate of Dáil reform. Therefore, I say to the Minister that he should get on with the job now.

This Bill is an Act to compel local authorities to provide members of the public and public representatives with substantive replies to written communications within a prescribed period of time. This is reasonable and my question to the House is what is wrong with that. Section 2(1) provides that where a member of the public or public representative sends a written communication to a local authority requesting a reply from that local authority, the local authority shall send a written acknowledgment in receipt of the written request to the member of the public within five working days of receipt of the written request. That is something we all do in our day jobs. We get a holding letter out first within a matter of 24 hours and then try to get back to the person within a number of days with a substantive response. The section further provides that a response should then be sent within 15 working days of the date upon which the written acknowledgment was sent.

There is nothing wrong with asking for and demanding efficient services for our people. This is very important. This was brought home to me during the recent flood crisis in the Donnycarney and Artane areas in my constituency. On the night of the floods when all hell broke loose, we could not get through to the so-called contact numbers. This was a disgrace. Even Deputy Brian Hayes, who is Minister of State with responsibility for the OPW, agreed with us on that. I was not happy with the city council response that night because some of the numbers were out of date and some of the people were inaccessible. I am not referring to the crisis with regard to the 999 number which was blocked up with the number of incidents. I am referring to councillors and Deputies not being able to get through to the council to get some idea of what was happening, while water was going in the windows of houses in Ardlea Road in Artane and in Donnycarney. That is unacceptable.

In fairness to the Minister he raised this issue with the councils and he put pressure on them to be more efficient in their response. However, the mindset has not changed and we had a row with the city manager ourselves. As soon as we came back, we asked for accurate information and proper figures so that we can deal with the next crisis when it happens, whether snow, ice or flooding. When I got the information and figures, I gave some of that information to key people in the flooded areas, but the city manager then rang us up and said we should not give that information out to people, although they were directly affected. This sort of stuff goes on. As someone who spent five years as a councillor with Dublin City Council, I am aware there is defensiveness on the part of some of the members of local authorities. I accept the point made by Deputy Doherty that there are very good people serving on the council who are very efficient. In my area I see some departments of the council are better than others. There are some fantastic people in the housing department and in the roads department, but it is a disaster in other departments and I am still waiting for them to get back to me on particular issues. I find this unacceptable. I wonder then about Mrs. O'Brien in Donnycarney, if I and my staff are having problems getting information. There is something radically wrong with the system and we need reform.

We talk about respect for citizens. We should look again at our charter within the Dáil. I was looking at the Dáil customer charter the other day. It refers to equality and diversity and to communicating with customers and correspondence. Our staff here say they will respond promptly to calls, give their names when they answer the phone, respond to voicemail messages and will provide an alternative contact person if out of the office. That is a reasonable approach and it should be adopted by the city councils. This legislation provides they will reply to letters and emails within 15 working days.

What Deputy Collins is trying to do with this Bill is to give some teeth to local authorities and to make them more efficient. There is nothing wrong or too extreme about that. It is a pity Deputy Buttimer is not here, because I heard him heckling Deputy Mattie McGrath about the Independent Deputies allowance and so on. I would like to remind him that the major political parties got €13.48 million of taxpayers' money, which is equivalent to approximately €120,000 per Deputy. Therefore, we will not take any such guff from them.

See this speech in context