Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

That is the point I was making. I think it would be highly unlikely. If we take a council like Fingal, which has 40 councillors, and it has to select two people to go forward to this decision making process, how will that be done? Representatives of small parties will certainly not be selected. I am a little surprised that this proposal is emanating from a small party.

This is not the direction in which we want to go. Dublin City Council and my colleague, Joe Higgins, a former Member of this Chamber, was a councillor on the then Dublin County Council. It was a massive body. We all know about the brown paper envelopes, or rather brown paper bags, in Conway's pub. Even on rezonings and environmental decisions, the purpose of breaking that up was to break up the possibility of corruption where councillors would be more easily answerable to their own communities. I saw on my council councillors from Howth voting for rezonings in Blanchardstown, etc. This is not what we need. We do not need to take powers from local areas. We should be devolving powers more to local areas.

There is a lot wrong with local government. There has been a trend, particularly with neoliberal politics, of denuding councillors of any powers. Essentially, there is no longer a waste service, a water service and housing is not being built. Councillors vote every four years on the development plan and there is not much else they have to do. A large number of powers are already given to the chief executive officers, CEOs, as they are called now. They do not even hide the fact that it is a business oriented process.

They have a huge amount of power as it is. This is about having one CEO for the whole of Dublin city and county instead of four, yet councillors will have even less to do.

We have seen with major infrastructural projects unelected Government agencies being given huge powers over relevant decisions. A good example is Poolbeg waste energy plant which was opposed by 61 of the 63 elected members on Dublin City Council who were overruled. Councillors are largely confined now to by-laws, five-yearly development plans and trying to achieve things for people on an individual basis. Local authority budgets have been completely gutted in the course of the eight years of austerity and when one tries to get things for the people who elected one, it is extremely difficult. That is the case with things as basic as road ramps. The Anti-Austerity Alliance would certainly support the restoration of decision-making powers to the 183 councillors elected at the last election. Their numbers were actually enlarged for the election. In practice, that means the municipalisation of waste collection, democratic local authority co-ordination of water, democratic oversight of a properly funded mass local authority house building programme and the provision of other amenities. Without that and without huge investment in local authorities, this whole debate is meaningless. The silence of the Bill on that is shocking and speaks volumes.

The most dangerous idea I have heard is that we need a Boris Johnson or Michael Bloomberg style celebrity to represent Dublin on the world stage. This is clearly gearing up to be a highly paid job for some politician from one of the bigger parties. Do we really need to create another layer of bureaucracy? I am very surprised it emanates from the Green Party whose members I would at least have thought stood for the concept of devolving decision-making to local communities. I do not see how the ordinary people of Dublin will benefit. There is widespread evidence from other countries where this strong man or woman has been brought in that it makes privatisation, anti-worker policies and a right-wing trend inevitable. This is a concept that is pioneered by business and the Dublin Chamber of Commerce whereas in places like Stoke-on-Trent, Hartlepool and Torbay, people have voted in favour of going back to the old system.

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