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

This morning the local newspaper in that town, theDrogheda Independent, has a front page story arguing that on this very issue it is time to get the power back. That town has felt the loss of those decisions. We will not oppose this Bill on Second Stage because as I said, we believe that any advancement of democratic institutions is to be welcomed. We made a firm commitment to town councils in our own election manifesto, and we moved our own Bill in this respect last year. However, we also believe that the model to be introduced needs to be different from what was there before. I have no problem admitting that there were many ineffective councils that had previously been town commissions. They had little budgetary power, if any. I also believe, as I said during scrutiny of our own Bill on Committee Stage with Deputy John Paul Phelan, that we need to be brave and imaginative about what we want to see for our local councils in future.

I have had a lot of engagement with councils in Italy, in the towns of Bobbio and Broccostella with which I twinned Navan. I gained huge insight from interaction with their elected administration. Those towns effectively have mini-cabinets at council level. Different councillors have portfolios concerning infrastructure, education or recreational facilities and the mayor has executive powers. The most immediate impact I could see was that when the mayor walked down the street of his own home town, people knew that this man was responsible for the running of their town. With that come all the perks and responsibility of that role. Crucially, people can see who is responsible when things go wrong and indeed when they go right. They have a sense of belonging to the administration in their town. There is a starting point for accountability, and that is crucial.

I firmly believe we need to get to that stage. We have the ultimate pass-the-can system in this country. We should be brave. We should look at enhancing the executive control of our own council chambers as opposed to the board of directors ethos that we have at present, whereby councillors come each month to simply receive a chief executive's report and toddle off again. We need something more radical and imaginative, something giving real power to those who are accountable to the people.

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