Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As Deputy Thomas Byrne said, the solution is the review that is under way. It is holding its first meeting today, and I will return to that in a moment.

We are all concerned with the whole of County Meath. Deputy Byrne has mentioned some towns and I will go through the rest - places like Navan, Trim, Enfield, Oldcastle or Athboy - and match them all up so that they all get the proper resources they need to provide the services for the people there. My job is to ensure we do that and I believe we are on the right track to do so again.

The problem was that our baseline figures were completely out of order because they were not sufficiently focused on population. In 1996, the funding as a national percentage that we used to get was 79%. Over the next ten or 15 years, that fell to 61% by 2005 or 2006. That is also the current position as it has not got any worse over the past seven or eight years, and in the past two or three years, we have begun to increase it. The funding has been wrong for many years. It is historical but it relates to the population increase, which could not be reflected in the funding because of the recession. The review of the baseline now under way will catch those population trends and the massive population increase in County Meath and put us in the position to close that gap over a period and get the funding to which we are entitled, in order to provide all the services that our county needs.

The setting up of the group to review the local government funding baselines is an acknowledgment of the challenges facing local authorities in funding, particularly in the context of the general economic circumstances facing the country over the past decade with reductions in central funding and constraints on income raising capacity. Thankfully this trend has now reversed with overall funding to local authorities starting to increase again. The most recent census in 2016 showed that Meath and several other counties have experienced a notable population increase in recent years. Meath's population grew by 6% in recent years alone but by 78% since 1996. Though a welcome development, I know at first hand, as does Deputy Thomas Byrne, that such changes can place additional demands on local authorities for services. Notwithstanding this, population is only one factor to be considered in local government funding but it is central to the review group.

The review group met today, with the first item on its agenda being the population and how that factors into funding. Under the current funding system for local government, each local authority has a minimum level of funding available known as the baseline. Given the separate review of local property tax currently being undertaken by the Minister for Finance, it is timely to conduct the parallel review of the local government funding methodology for such general purposes that I have referred to. That review of both the baseline and of the local property tax will give us a solution to provide the funding our county needs.

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