Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Local Government Bill 2013. As the Minister will no doubt tell us, it introduces far ranging reform. I agree that we need reform and I examined this issue during the previous Administration. I accept that the system previously in place was hotchpotch and riddled with inconsistencies. We need to reconsider local government. However, the question arises as to whether we will get real local government from this Bill.

Members of this House from all parties, including my own, have a great grá for regional authorities.

However, they are a handy vehicle for the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government to have a regional strategic plan drafted with only a small number of councillors present from each county. Councillors might endorse it without even reading it. When their counties come to draft their own county plans, however, they find themselves hamstrung by a document called the regional strategic policy guidelines. I was told that these were needed to take a larger view of the world. For example, Clare and Limerick could be taken together in a regional authority. This was a plausible argument, but then I asked about Athlone. The old problem would arise there because there would be two different regions regardless of how they were configured. A region that crossed the Shannon would not be coherent.

I am not a great fan of regional authorities. They are anti-democratic, as they are not elected by the people. Some 98% or 99% of people have no input into them or even know that these bodies that make major decisions exist.

There is a logic for having a fourth tier for everyone as long as it is genuinely powerful. The Minister has claimed that he will give power to this fourth tier of government. Not all of the local district councils will be municipal councils, as not all have municipalities. This country is obsessed with towns. Under the Minister's proposal, the fourth tier can make plans to beat the band, but it cannot make decisions on planning in councils' respective areas, nor will it have control over housing or direct control over roads. These are the practical issues in which councillors excel.

I have been in this House for a long time and I was on a local authority for a considerable period. Plans have multiplied in size. A county plan used to be a manageable document. Now, it will stretch into books. If one could find out how many councillors read through every line of their respective plans, one would find that the plans were much more the creation of the planners than the local authority members. One might claim that this is how it should be. Perhaps this is so, but any plan must take into account the realities of people's lives, their time pressures, etc. The so-called fourth tier, the local level, should have the type of powers that the most powerful town council used to have. These powers should be uniform across the State.

I can never understand what the magic difference is between a town and an area that has a mixture of town and countryside. As I used to ask in my sarcastic moments, what are so special about people with much smaller back gardens than others? They all need the same services nowadays, for example, water, street lighting in villages, refuse, etc. They pay for them. I compliment the Minister in this regard, as I can never understand why people claim that we need a greater level of local government for those who happen to live in houses close together than we do for people in houses that are a little farther apart. That system created distortions between town and county planning authorities, in that people built in whichever area enjoyed cheaper rates. This issue is rightly addressed in the Bill.

What the Minister is trying to do with the local development organisations that run the Leader partnerships is vague. I am unsure as to whether the Bill explains the situation.

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