Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I wish to question the Bill before us without being insulting to either Fianna Fáil or the Green Party but I do not understand the point of either Bill. I have tried to read the Green Party Bill, which is very elaborate. The Fianna Fáil Bill is easier to read but both Bills seem to be putting the cart before the horse. As somebody who has just spent seven years in a local authority I argue that we should reform local authorities first before even thinking about a plebiscite or the election of a mayor.

The reason I say that is that if one looks at the history of the role of local authorities and locally elected councillors it has radically changed in recent decades. When one talks about engaging local people and making them feel like they have a say in their city or in what goes on in their community then one is fooling people. People like me and others have run in local elections over the years. We successfully got elected on the basis of manifestos where we promised to do something about housing, waste management, libraries and planning, which are the issues that concern people in their local communities. We addressed these issues, as people who were willing to put ourselves before the people and to represent them, but when we got elected to a local authority we found we were toothless on the most important issues. Local authorities used to play a very serious role in the provision of social housing, a role that meant they directly employed thousands of workers to both build and maintain a large stock of social housing. That is now gone from the powers of local councillors. The provision of housing is an executive function and ultimately what is called the CEO – I will come back to the language in a moment – formerly known as the manager, makes the decisions in that regard. Local councillors no longer have any power over the issues of bins, street cleaning, waste management or incineration, a very important issue in the cities of Dublin and Cork. This is ironic when it was Noel Dempsey of Fianna Fáil who brought in an amendment to the Waste Management Act 1996 to give complete power to the manager or to make it an executive function.

It has led to a really farcical situation where, during the seven years I spent on Dublin City Council, we voted by a majority three times to reject incineration in Poolbeg. This happened recently in Cork City Council where the majority of councillors voted to reject an incinerator in Ringaskiddy. Despite that, the appointed and well-paid managers, who are unelected, fly in the face of what the councillors, who are elected by people, want for their cities and impose their own will. The same was true of the privatisation of the bin service, which was a real tragedy. We saw it recently with the row about all of the companies, which are literally cartels rather than competitive services, fixing prices for green bins. It became a big issue in this Dáil and it has become a big issue in terms of the cost and failure of waste management in our cities. There are many issues. I do not have time to go into them now but the privatisation of waste management has failed our cities and towns.

Water has been taken from us and hived off to Irish Water. Deciding on the provision of water used to be the responsibility of local authority councillors with a very limited budget and without serious capital investment from the Government, which is one of the central planks of our argument against the water charges. Again, an unelected manager was imposing his will on this issue.

We never had a say over transport, planning and housing. Various tribunals, including the Mahon tribunal, had to take powers from the councillors because of the brown envelope brigade and the historic legacy of both conservative parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Planning democracy was removed from locally elected councillors. We are now faced with big landbanks such as those around Malahide, Finglas and Cherry Orchard. The Minister sets up a housing land initiative and tells councils they must put out for expressions of interest from developers in these lands. When a local councillor asks the manager about the interest in these lands, whether any social housing will be built on them and whether any of the voluntary housing agencies have expressed an interest, they are told nothing because it is a matter of commercial sensitivity. This also leads on to a lack of input from councillors with regard to things like rapid build being imposed on the people of Curlew Road in Drimnagh and the people of Cherry Orchard without any consultation and Carman's Hall being taken over from the community in the Liberties without any consultation. I was the chairperson of the local Traveller area accommodation committee for five years. Having spent months developing a Traveller accommodation programme, we then discovered through a report in TheIrish Timesthat the funding for Traveller accommodation was not drawn down not just by the local authority but by many local authorities throughout the country on the basis of anti-social behaviour. Since when did we penalise entire communities for the anti-social behaviour of a few within their community? We only do it to Travellers. We are left in this very frustrating position of not being told anything and having no power to override the manager on it.

In respect of management, I referred to the fact these individuals are very highly paid and are not elected. I think 50% of councillors have to endorse them. They do not even have to get the 75% that is required to overturn a decision they may make that councillors want to challenge. However, they play a very important role because they are now called chief executive officer, CEO. The language says it all. Our cities, towns and local authorities are being turned into management committees for commercial purposes. When it is stripped down, there is very little, if any, role for a local councillor in the provision of housing, planning, water, waste management and other services like libraries. They will be turning on Christmas lights in all the constituencies in the next week, they will feel great about it and some of them will wear the chain of office of mayor, but it is so frustrating to be there. Two years ago, one of our councillors, Tina McVeigh, got a motion passed that Dublin City Council would set up a directory of derelict buildings to look at the possibility of either buying or pulling some of them back in for the provision of housing. Zilch was done about it. Last Monday, another one of our councillors, John Lyons, got a motion passed to oppose staffless libraries. The city manager, Owen Keegan, immediately came out with a statement that they will be a wonderful thing and that we will see the introduction of staffless libraries. Where does that leave democracy?

We are putting the cart before the horse. The question of local democracy is a fundamental one. A series of Acts or amendments to Acts imposed by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party over the years have meant that there has been a serious erosion and hollowing out of the role of locally elected councillors. Unless we deal with that in the first instance and straight away, what is the point of electing a mayor? All we will be doing is giving serious powers to somebody who will oversee the running of the city, with powers all to themselves and without having a board of directors that have some say in the running of this company. The CEO will be replaced by a mayor. That in itself sounds democratic but we really need to start from the bottom up and rebuild local democracy and give councillors a say. That is why they get elected - not to turn on Christmas tree lights but to do something serious about the provision of services and the maintenance of a real life in a city instead of turning it into a city of cafés, clubs and cobblestones that will attract foreign direct investment as an alternative to a real living city for ordinary decent people.

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