Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent)

I am pleased to speak in support of this Bill. I compliment Deputy McGuinness for his research which he carried out himself as, like any of us, he has no support. As other Deputies have observed it is regrettable that the Government has rejected this Bill outright instead of allowing it be discussed and amended on Committee Stage. The promise of reform rings hollow. Four or five Private Members' Bills have been discussed at Friday sittings of the House and each one has been rejected by the Government. Such Bills entail a significant amount of work and this has to be done with one's own resources. I agree the Minister of State's approach is reasonable but when I presented a Private Members' Bill, the Minister of the day ridiculed me. He said I should have spoken to him beforehand to enlist his support but he had notice of the Bill several months earlier. That is a matter for another day. It is a pity that meaningful pieces of legislation are not taken in good faith and allowed go to Committee Stage.

Deputy McGuinness is the Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts and he also has significant experience as a member of that committee. In order to have good governance, as has been said, there must be accountability and transparency. I want to echo what Deputy Pringle has just said. I was a member of a county council for almost ten years, and one does not get answers. If one starts to ask questions, one can be blacklisted and regarded as a nuisance and not the good boy in the class. On some occasions, one may be told, "Change your attitude or you won't get any kind of services". That will be hinted at subtly, but it is wrong because we are elected by the people to represent them and raise issues. Accountability is a big issue. Some €5 billion per annum was spent before the Minister, Deputy Rabbitte, produced his report. That is a huge amount money, although it has decreased to €4.5 billion this year. There are anomalies and shortcomings - we all have those, unfortunately - but there is no accountability because county managers are all powerful.

What sticks in people's craw is that when county managers and senior officials retire, at a young enough age with big severance packages, they are back the next day in a consultancy role advising county councils how to amalgamate services. This is not good enough. With 450,000 people unemployed, why do we have to re-hire retired senior departmental officials, county managers and assistant mangers to undertake reviews? It is a gravy train but it should be stopped because there are thousands of people well qualified to deal with those issues.

The National Roads Authority has done a lot of work with senior council officials, but one cannot talk to it. They are the real gods on high. I have said before that we got rid of the IRA but now we have the NRA. I mean that because the authority is untouchable and one cannot engage with it. The NRA built the motorways, which is a fine network, but there are no rest areas. The NRA would not listen to anybody. The NRA consumed large parcels of land in my constituency which were not needed. We are now damned year after year by seasonal traders who upset everybody. The NRA took acres that were never required, but why was it allowed to do that? The land was the subject of compulsory purchase orders and was bought dearly. The NRA had nearly enough land to build two roads, but there was no accountability involved. When I asked why it took over this land, I was told "You'll have to talk to the design team".

Anyone travelling from Dublin to Cork will know there is a problem with part of the motorway on the Tipperary-Limerick border where one lane is currently closed for repair works. I was told it was a drainage problem but we do not know. I asked who would pay for the repairs because that road was built by a contractor. It was a fine job which was delivered on time and under budget, so is there a guarantee or will the country council have to pay for the repairs? If not, who will have to pay? It should not be a matter of guess work to find out.

The Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Phil Hogan, is introducing household, septic tank and water charges. I want to raise the issue of consultants again. A village in my area - Grangemore, near Cahir - badly needed a sewage treatment plant. In November 2010, I was delighted when a sum of €1.2 million was allocated for that work. We have been unable to get that work done, however, because it had to go to the consultants. This is the case even though a private developer had purchased land and designed a housing scheme and a sewage treatment plant, working every step of the way in conjunction with the county council. Conjunction may be the wrong word, but all the time he had pre-planning and had consulted with the county council. In fact, the council told him to take over the scheme. It was stipulated in the planning grant that if he had not done it by a certain date, the council would do it. The developer has those plans, which cost a lot of money. I am not saying they are perfect but the council refused to take them on board. The council has put out a tender for more consultants to design a scheme. It is an outrage that taxpayers' money is sitting there waiting to be used while everything is going into the river. That scheme was properly designed with county council engineers, using qualified architects and designers. It is not a penny-ha'penny job, it is top class and is necessary. I will raise the matter as a Topical Issue to try to get it moved on. It is there and ready-made. I am not saying that we have to cut out the tendering process, but they are now tendering for consultants. I believe that one of the consultants who did not get the job is objecting because he probably had a cosy little patch there and is wondering why somebody else got it.

We have had no action on the ground, however, and are still waiting for it. The backlog is still there and the damage has been done by the consultancy industry. When I joined the county council in 1991, a county manager, a county engineer, a county secretary and area engineers ran the council. Now we have a county manager, six directors of services and senior people below them. It is all chiefs and no indians. The staff on the ground have been stripped. The office staff and ordinary officials had to pay the pension levy, while the county manager and director of services were exempt. That is because the then Minister for Finance, the late Brian Lenihan - God be good to him - went back on the decision to put a pension levy on those earners. When I asked about a group of officials at a certain level, I was told there were only 16 or 17 of them, but there were in fact 700 or 800 who do not pay the levy. Meanwhile, ordinary staff who earn the bonuses that these people get at the top, must pay the pension levy. The system is unfair and rotten to the core.

Deputy McGuinness's Bill is badly needed in order to get some accountability in this regard. As he said, we get stick for the ways things happen, but we have no control over it. We should have control, however, because control must be brought back to this place. It should be taken away from advisers and senior officials. Some of them are very good and decent people, but others would treat one with contempt.

One cannot move a bend in the road now without getting consultants to design it. It is a shameful racket which needs to be exposed. As Deputy Pringle said, it is literally a gravy train. There was no such thing as a consultant back in 1991. The council engineers did their work, but now if they want to build a scheme of perhaps ten houses in a village, they put it out to tender and a consultant will design it. If they want to build five houses in the next village, they will put it out for tender again and get different consultants. That nonsense has to stop. I know one cannot lift the design for one village and use it for the next, but surely one can tweak a pretty basic design. One should not have to use the consultancy process again.

I have been trying to advance the Burncourt and Fethard regional water scheme for 20 years. Money was approved for it in 1998, yet a shovel has still not gone into the ground. People there tell me they will not pay any water charges because they have a notice to boil drinking water for almost ten months of the year. One could not drink that water, yet here we have consultants doing designs, which go up to the Department. The Department looks at them for six months and probably gets in more consultants, although I do not know. The designs are then sent back down again and the consultants have to do another design, build and operate plan. It is just shuffling paper from here to there in order to justify their existence. Nothing is happening apart from wasting money that has been approved for projects, so it is never spent on them. When I asked if the money was still there, I was told "No, we had to hire consultants and do reports". The money is gone and nothing has been done on the ground. It is beyond a joke. Somebody needs to examine this matter and this Bill is an ideal vehicle for such an examination.

How could anyone spend that kind of money on the plans for a new national children's hospital? How could the consultants and designers adopt that sort of design without knowing that it would be knocked back? There is such a thing as pre-planning for any kind of building. When one is considering building a house, one is encouraged to undertake pre-planning. How could that kind of money be wasted on a children's hospital project which was rejected due to its height? I only know what I have read about it, but it seems they knew it was not going to be passed. All the money has gone, but it beggars belief that they did not cop on. Can we not get some kind of indicative reply from An Bord Pleanála or the officials on Dublin City Council? This will not do. They say it is grand and they will re-design it, and they are still talking about looking for sites. It goes on in every county council and town council, yet there is no accountability.

Two years ago, I sent out a number of texts wishing people a happy new year. I received a most obnoxious text back from a town clerk, which I brought to the attention of the county manager. It amounted to a threat and when I told him he was not the boss he told me to away. There is no accountability. That is the type of thing that is happening. At that time I was a Member of this House and while I was not a member of a county council, I and other Members have a working relationship with the county councils. It is something we must have.

This legislation is timely and long overdue. I am disappointed the Minister of State indicated he will not be accepting it. If accepted, it could be referred to a committee where we could add to it, delete from it discuss it in detail and her Department officials could then deal with it. Ordinary Members do not have any resources to research such Bills other than those they have themselves, such as their personal assistant and a secretary and perhaps some voluntary assistance. We are not able to match what is in the Department but sometimes I think we nearly could. Common sense prevails where we are concerned most of the time but it seems to get very fazed and convoluted when it comes to issues and when consultants are brought in. It is time to cry halt to the bringing in of consultants.

Another issue in this context that arose in Tipperary relates to the upgrading of a road. People had been waiting for 40 years to have this work done and some €120,000 was spent on it. A fine job was done but after a night's rain all the work was undone. A big investigation was undertaken to find out the cause of the problem and a report that was done on it stated that the chips used could have been dirty, that the tar was not laid at the right temperature, that the wet mix was not at the right temperature or of the right quality, or that it could have come down to the mechanical operator of the machine. The attitude was, "Go away and do not be asking more questions". After all that, somebody had to take responsibility for these issues. That road had to be redone the next year and that meant other roads on the list to be upgraded took even longer to be done. There was no accountability for the waste involved. The cause was attributed to the possibility of four or five different matters. If a private contractor had been doing that job, he would have had to redo it at his own expense and that would be proper order. We cannot continue to have such a waste of resources. When people like Deputy McGuinness make a reasonable effort to discuss legislation such as this, it should be accepted.

On the matter of the attendance here today, the Technical Group, which is one of the smallest groups in the House, had by far the largest number in attendance at the start of proceedings this morning. The benches on the Minister of State's side of the House are pretty empty.

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