Shane Cassells (Meath West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

I thank the Ceann Comhairle. It is a privilege to speak on Second Stage of our town council Bill. On the plinth today, I spoke about the fact that our Constitution had been given quite an airing in the Chamber over the past week, from the misquoting of Article 13 last week to Article 35, pertaining to the Judiciary, and Article 33 on the Comptroller and Auditor General in terms of his role in the investigation into Templemore and our work at the Committee of Public Accounts. However, another article is rarely quoted, namely, Article 28A on local government. It shows the importance of local government in terms of the delivery of services and the essence of what makes our communities, towns and estates the vibrant places to live and rear our families in and where we enjoy the fabric of our unique society. However, this article gets overlooked any time that a Government meddles in the structures of local government under the much abused word "reform".

I am unashamedly an advocate of local government, having first been elected as a 21 year old to Navan Town Council in 1999 and, subsequently, to Meath County Council and having served 17 years in the local government structure before entering Dáil Éireann.

What happened in 2013 through the previous local government Act in the name of "reform" under the now European Commissioner, Mr. Phil Hogan, was butchery, plain and simple. It was butchery of democracy and the worst attack on our systems in 100 years. At a European level, the lack of resources allocated and attention paid to local government that manifested most acutely in Fine Gael's "Putting People First" policy document, which later came into the legislative realm, was heavily criticised in a 2013 report of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe.

The abolition of town councils has masked the fact that there is a much deeper funding crisis in local government, given that no increase in the general purpose grant was subsequently allocated to counties. That was a good sleight of hand. The money was kept back and Members across the way thought that no one would notice if the traditional block grants allocated to county towns were not added to counties' overall figures the following year. The counties were impoverished even further. On top of that, there was the same sleight of hand with the allocation of roads funding. Since the money that traditionally had gone to town councils was not added to the county totals the year after abolition, many counties found themselves down hundreds of thousands of euro. As the Minister of State, Deputy English, knows, our county of Meath was down €1 million in 2015. Some thought that people would not notice, but they did notice because the councils were broke to begin with, and this only reduced their ability to offer services to people further.

Apart from anything else, the wiping away of those 80 town councils, which had served their communities well over the course of 115 years, with the stroke of a pen showed how former Minister Phil Hogan and the Government of the time did not understand how local communities worked and interacted with local councils. There is no need for slagging people off in the Chamber because there is a broad acceptance. In particular, Deputy Howlin noted in 2015 that abolition was the worst mistake of his time in the previous Government and that what had been done was wrong. Through this Bill, we in Fianna Fáil seek to reverse that wrong and re-establish the town council structure as a form of government in Ireland, with the purpose of growing urban centres and giving our large towns, where tens of thousands of people live, a proper mechanism for the delivery of services that they deserve. That is the motivation.

Why should something that was abolished be brought back is a question that is being rightly asked of us. The answer is that there is now a gaping void in how the needs of people in large towns are met. Neither public representatives nor dedicated sets of officials are in place to give vision and purpose to the towns in the years ahead. Engineers are spread over multiple municipal districts the size of Dáil constituencies. People who are calling out for proper services, be those in terms of roads, water or sewerage, cannot get answers because engineers are dealing with a number of electoral areas. There are no dedicated and ring-fenced town council budgets, which would have been in the realm of tens of millions of euro in the case of many large towns and boroughs, and no dedicated statutory town development plans, which can provide people with a vision of how their towns will grow. When it comes to money, there is no ability to retain the local property tax, which is raised in the main from the pockets of people living in large towns and spread over wide areas instead of being retained within the areas from which it is raised. If statutory councils were in place, they would be able to retain such funds on behalf of those who paid the money.

Businesses know only too well the fallout from the abolition of town councils. Walk down any main street and talk to a shopkeeper. The commercial rates of small and large businesses in every town suddenly rose because almost every town commercial rate had been lower than the county rate. We are now in a period of equalisation. Due to the abolition of town councils, town businesses - they are the main employers in counties and keep vibrant town centres alive against tall odds - have suddenly had an additional charge put on them. That will continue over the next decade as part of the equalisation of rates. The business people who are keeping Ireland outside of Dublin city alive know only too well what abolishing town councils meant for them.

I am committed to seeing good local governance in place because I believe that councils deliver on the ground the services that people require. At today's press conference on the plinth, I was asked whether town councils had been anything more than talking shops. In the case of my town council, which I spent many years proudly serving on, if the delivery of a €13 million theatre, new swimming pool, gymnasium, 68-acre park, enterprise zone and enhanced town centre was the result of a talking shop, it was a bloody good one. That multimillion euro investment was achieved in the space of a decade during which I was privileged to serve as mayor of Navan on two occasions-----

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