Séamus Healy (Tipperary South, Workers and Unemployed Action Group) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Local Government Bill 2013. This Bill purports to be about putting people first and informing local government and local democracy. It is nothing like that, it is about the destruction of local democracy. Local democracy is about the provision of local services to facilitate access for people to those services and indeed to public representatives. The principle of subsidiarity suggests very strongly that local services should be provided as close as possible to the people that they serve. This Bill and the policy being pursued by this Government goes in the opposite direction. It is the story that big is supposed to be better, that centralisation is better, but we know that bigger is not better and neither is centralisation. The delivery of local services to people should be done at the lowest level possible, town level, across the country.

This Bill proposes to abolish 80 town councils and reduces the number of councillors by a third. We will now have the lowest number of councillors per head of population in any EU or OECD country. We will have abolished town and borough councils which have a long tradition and history. My own county, Tipperary, is particularly badly affected as seven local authorities will be abolished, Clonmel Borough Council, Carrick-on-Suir, Cashel, Tipperary, Templemore, Nenagh and Thurles town councils. North and South Tipperary county councils will be amalgamated. It is a tragedy to abolish a borough council in my hometown of Clonmel which led the fight against Cromwell and was the only town to defeat him, in 1648, led by the Mayor of the day, Mayor White and supported by Hugh Dubh O'Neill from Ulster. The town and its council have many traditions and a long history. It is wrong to abolish town and borough councils because they represent our past and if we do not know where we came from we will hardly know where to go in the future.

The policy being pursued by the Government includes the reduction of council powers, as in the case of water services. It also reduces funding to local authorities. Over recent years €500 million has been taken out of the funding of local authorities. That started in 2011 with a 9% reduction, another 9% in 2012 and further reductions in 2013 and 2014, starving local authorities of funds and income to provide services.

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