Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Ireland signed up to the European Charter of Local Self-Government in November 1997 and ratified it in May 2002. The first monitoring visit by the Council of Europe was performed in 2001 and then again in October 2012. The recent draft report, Local Democracy in Ireland, which still is not generally available in the public domain for some strange reason, makes for illuminating reading. Its authors make extensive reference to and perform a critical dismantling of the much hyped Action Programme for Effective Local Government to which this Bill is to give legislative effect. After an exploration of the proposed action programme, the report found that many of the recommendations made in 2001 are still valid. It states:

Local authorities in Ireland still cannot be said to “regulate and manage a substantial share of public affairs”; the principle of subsidiarity is still not a primary concern in the allocation of public responsibilities. Local authorities’ discretion is still highly circumscribed through the use of statutory instruments and regulations to supplement laws, and the need to secure sanctions and prior approvals from national government for many activities. Consultation of local authorities over new legislation or financial decisions is not systematic. Local authorities are not provided with adequate or sufficiently diversified resources which are commensurate with the responsibilities of local government. Specific or earmarked grants still make up a significant proportion of central government transfers.

The report went on to perform an analysis of the situation of local democracy in Ireland, in light of the European Charter of Local Self-Government on an article by article basis and, without fail, found that Ireland does not live up to the conditions of the charter, even with the amendments to the principal Act that are proposed in this Bill.

With this Bill, the Minister promises Members the sun, moon, and stars in terms of the betterment of participatory local democracy in Ireland, but all he provides them with is empty bombast and misinformation as to what really is the purpose of this Bill. The Minister promises this Bill will provide a comprehensive, modern system of municipal governance with appropriate financial arrangements, a wider provision for devolution of functions from central level to local government and a strengthening of governance and oversight arrangements and powers of elected councils. This is hard to take, as it is abundantly clear that the Bill will deliver on none of these promises. Moreover, they are meaningless as long as local government continues to have relatively few functions, especially in comparison with our European neighbours. This fact has been highlighted repeatedly by Dr. Proinnsias Breathnach, who has observed that in European countries, everyday services such as education, health, police and so on are delivered at local level. In Ireland, by contrast, most of these services are organised at central level and this situation, argues Dr. Breathnach, has a reflexive effect on the kind of politics one gets in this country. He explains:

A lot of TDs see it as their main function to look after local constituents rather than to legislate. This has come home to roost now. The inability of the Government to deal with the current crisis is partly because people in Government are not [at] all up to the job because their main concern is looking after local needs ... If there was a clear separation of national functions and local functions, we would get a different type of person elected to the Dáil.

I would argue that were Ireland to have local councillors with real responsibility who were put into decision-making positions when elected, one also would get a different animal when electing local authority people. These comments are instructive in light of the fact that at the onset of the crisis, central government effectively handed over its decision-making powers to European and international neoliberal financial managers.

Another reason no change will issue from this Bill is that a massive bureaucratic machine has been set up in Dublin and its civil servants are not prepared to start giving up their functions and handing them out to those down in the country. Dr. Breathnach illustrated this situation by pointing out that in the preparation of the action programme, all Departments were requested to identify functions and services they currently performed centrally and which potentially could be devolved to local government. The action programme document records no response to this request from the Departments of Education and Skills, Health, Social Protection, Children and Youth Affairs, Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Defence and Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. Imagine that. According to Dr. Breathnach, "To give them their due, the Department of Agriculture, Food & Marine did manage to identify one function capable of being devolved to the local level, the function in question being responsibility for coastal navigation aids". This is mad stuff. In Wexford, responsibility for driving licences has just been moved from the local authority to an office in the centre of town. The local authority does not understand the reason for this because it had the structure, staff, experience and all necessary facilities to carry out this function. Moreover, it had parking spaces available. However, people are now obliged to go into the centre of town to a new office that it was necessary to rent, new staff were hired at additional expense to the State and people cannot get parking because the town centre is clogged and yet this is considered to be a good idea. I do not understand this and people are very disillusioned as to what central government has planned for them in the long term.

I am pretty familiar with Dublin City Council, due to all the work my company did in the city, and a huge undermining of morale in Dublin City Council is under way at present. First, in 2008 and 2009, all the graduates from engineering, architecture and planning, professionals of all sorts, were laid off. Since then, there has been no recruitment because a recruitment embargo is in place. On top of that, the most experienced and best of the staff are leaving because of different structures the Government has put in place and because they are getting out before losing more of their money. Overall, this means one will have staff who are cheaper because anyone who eventually is taken on obviously will be working for less than were the experienced staff. However, were I the new city manager of Dublin City Council, Owen Keegan, I would not be sleeping well at night given the amount of talent that remains at his disposal to run the capital city. This is lunacy and it does not make sense. One of the assistant managers is due to retire very soon but he will not be replaced. Right now, services such as water or waste are all being run into the roads section. There is actually a suspicion that the Government's long-term plan is the privatisation of local authorities. This is because the Government is undermining them to such an extent that it will make it impossible for the local authorities to function, after which the Government will be in a position to claim that as they cannot function or do the job, it will be necessary to privatise them. This would suit the neoliberal agenda and God knows, the major decisions are not being made in Ireland any more but are being made by people who do not live here.

The Bill does nothing to change the situation whereby a local authority effectively has very little control over its finances or any significant decision-making powers with regard to the most important public services, which are public services the Government increasingly views as commodities up for sale to private corporations. Has the Government forgotten that private companies are legally bound to increase their share price, irrespective of the cost to the people of Ireland?

If the Government's programme of privatisation continues, public services will increasingly be provided by those who view profit as more important than people, the environment or quality of service. That is not rocket science. The law demands of publicly owned companies that they maximise their profits. It is illegal for them not to do so. They are not allowed to consider the individual who they are supposed to be serving as an citizen, he or she is considered a commodity or a consumer.

A substantial part of the Bill refers to the strengthening of local government in local economic development but it is impossible to find anything in it that speaks to this. These seem to be a mere reshuffling of functions already performed at a local level; reshuffling is the general impression one gets from the Bill, reshuffling, cutting and pasting, changing the names and saving a few euro for the troika in the process.

There are no surprises here. Successive governments have been faced with the problem of local government and have done nothing about it. They have promised all sorts of improvements and enhanced democracy in order to keep the European Commission at bay, but now it seems this Government has simply decided to throw in the towel. Local government is viewed with such distaste from the Government benches that it is now regarded as simply another target for cuts. One has to appreciate the marketing strategy built into the Bill, namely, that when one is being forced to cut back on the quality of a product, one's best option is to change the packaging and call it by a different name, and then tell everyone lies about how good it is. McDonald's would not better them.

Why would this Government devolve responsibility and authority to local government in any meaningful way? We do not even have responsibility and authority at the level of central government. Ever since our referendum on the fiscal compact treaty in 2012, carried by a dismal 30% of the electorate under dire threats of harsher budget cuts if the people delivered the wrong answer, we have effectively seen our sovereignty complete its migration to Frankfurt, Brussels and Berlin, and for what - a pat on the head and in the words of one German official, the accolade of being "a model bailout student", and what a good student we have been. This Government has not erred from the terms of the troika’s memorandum of understanding and we are well on our way with its demands to amalgamate schools, reorganise local government, chop health spending and cut wages, driving them down into the ground.

In words of Susan Watkins, editor of the New Left Review, "Elected legislators in the target countries [of the European Financial Stability Facility] have been reduced to clerks". Watkins made a special note in the case of Ireland when she wrote that "Irish TDs have so far internalized their subaltern status that a debate on designating June 16, Bloomsday, a public holiday, to celebrate the country’s ‘great literary tradition’, was brought to a halt by a ministerial reminder that the Troika’s permission would need to be sought first". Could the words of Angela Merkel in November 2012 have been any more to the point when she said, “There is no such thing any more as domestic policy making”? Well Angela would say that. Instead of national sovereignty, or anything resembling a democracy, we have a collection of neoliberal clerks working on behalf of the markets, committed first and foremost to protecting investors, demanding austerity and deficit reduction, with scant regard for the dangers that these policies pose to the economy, society and the environment.

To paraphrase an analysis of the hollowing out of democracy by Nancy Fraser, one of the world’s foremost political philosophers, the situation is as follows: with the advent of globalisation, the international discussion that took place from the end of the Second World War up until the 1970s over what should count as a just ordering of social relations within a society has been distorted and to a certain extent disregarded as the goal posts have moved. The social processes shaping our lives now routinely overflow territorial borders. Nations are faced with a new vulnerability to transnational forces – supranational and international organisations, both governmental and non-governmental. Under this new paradigm, people the world over find themselves struggling against despotic local and national authorities, transnational corporate predation and global neoliberalism. The new governance structures of the global economy have vastly strengthened the ability of large corporations and investors to escape the regulatory and taxation powers of territorial states. I can assure the Minister that if the transatlantic trade arrangement comes into place there will be even further erosion of any notion of sovereignty left here.

The Government members came in here today with great ceremony. One would think one was in the House of Lords in London given the way the business was carried out. It was a master stroke in performance but it lacks substance. If anyone is dull enough to think that all of a sudden we will have the decision-making process back in our hands as long as the Government adheres to a neoliberal philosophy, allows itself to be dictated by the concerns of the financial markets and that by rushing from the arms of the troika into the arms of the financial markets we are escaping from something terrible and moving to something wonderful, God help them. The financial markets have no memories and they certainly have no compassion. They could not give a fiddler's about us and will screw us for every penny they can when they can. Just watch.

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