Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

A discussion on local government reform is very welcome. This discussion is also welcome in so far as the Bill brought forward by Fianna Fáil tries to deal with the considerable frustration among the public and among staff of local authorities. The Bill is fine as far as it goes. It is reasonable to expect that the public can get a prompt and substantive response from local authorities and that they should have recourse to the Ombudsman if they do not get that.

I do not want to score political points, but I must say this. Fianna Fáil should raise its hands in the context of the problems that currently exist in local government and its responsibility for those problems. If we want a greater level of accountability from local authorities, we should, for example, apologise for the fact that it was Fianna Fáil who made the decision to take control of waste collection services out of the hands of elected councillors and into the hands of unelected managers. That was an anti-democratic move which moved local authorities further away from public accountability. This relates to a wider issue which must be acknowledged by both this and the previous Government, namely, that the more local services are privatised and outsourced, the less accountability there is over those services and the less recourse the public has to question, interrogate or find out what is going on with regard to the delivery of those services. The services go into private hands and nobody is democratically accountable for them. Privatisation is antithetical to any sort of proper accountability that will ensure the public can get answers and have some input in terms of the delivery and quality of services.

We may have all the aspirations we want about prompt responses and so on, but if we do not have the resources and staff to deliver those responses, it remains an aspiration. Worse still, extreme pressure is put on staff who are already under pressure.

Everyone recognises that there are major difficulties with local government and local services, but it is important to stress that these are not due to a lack of quality, ability or willingness to work among staff. We have a sizable debt to local authority workers, as was particularly evident from the works they carried out during the large snowfalls and floods.

The problem lies in the fact that there are not enough local authority workers. Some 25% of staff have left my council since the height of the boom. Losing a quarter of library staff has led to a reduction in library opening hours and services. The same could be said in the case of housing maintenance, in that the slowness in work being carried out is the result of a reduction in staff. If we are to have quality local services and public accountability, people who are capable of delivering those services must be in place.

The historical underfunding of local government is a factor and the Government is wrong to try to deal with it by imposing flat charges and regressive property charges.

In urban areas and perhaps in rural areas, one of the main issues with which Deputies and councillors must deal is that of being telephoned by people who are desperate for housing or housing maintenance work. Any Government must realise how wrong it is that people who need housing are ringing politicians and putting pressure on local authorities when more empty houses than could be possibly required are available. I cannot understand why we cannot resolve this simple problem, as it would remove considerable pressure from local authorities. Leasing properties from developers is the wrong approach and wastes public money. Were the NAMA properties put under the direct control of local authorities, we could house significant numbers of people and the rents could accrue to the authorities, which are in dire need of extra revenue streams.

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