Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am perplexed by the rush to introduce this in this manner. Concerns have been expressed by various Deputies. I will not repeat them. I agree with them. My interest in this Bill concerns the proposal to amalgamate Galway city and county, which takes up three or four lines in the Bill. The rest of it concerns Cork. On top of that, and I will return to that point, we are now being asked to look at an entirely new Bill in this manner. I agree with Deputy Ó Broin that a briefing should be given but it should be given to all of us.

A number of Deputies and I met with the Minister of State and his officials. I was horrified by the lack of understanding of Galway city and county and the fact that the proposal to amalgamate them was based simply on the logic that bigger is better. It completely ignored the interim report. It took the one recommendation that they should be merged and ignored what was set out - the conditions precedent, which said that staffing and resources had to be looked at prior to any merger. In the Minister of State's speech, we were told about directly elected mayors, about which I will keep an open mind. It involves Limerick and Galway city and county. It is in anticipation of the merger of the two local authorities. I have tabled an amendment. I understand Deputies Ó Cuív, Grealish and Fitzpatrick have tabled amendments to remove the proposed merger between the city and county. Is the Minister of State going to ignore that and just go right ahead? Is that what democracy means? Is the Minister of State going to listen to us? I am a committed Galwegian. I love my city and want it to grow and develop but I fundamentally object to the notion that bigger is better when it is not based on any evidence. The Minister of State may recall the packed meeting in the audiovisual room only two weeks ago involving a presentation where we were to make our decisions based on evidence. Evidence has gone out the window with regard to this and we have nebulous concepts like bigger is better when we know that is not true. I have already mentioned the Lisbon Treaty, which contains a commitment to making decisions closer to the people on the ground and not removing them. Yet we are going ahead with this. We started off with a Bill where the Cork boundary was to be extended, which is a matter for the Cork people to look at. Galway was stuck in with two or three lines telling us that bigger is better and that we were going to take the first step, ignoring the interim report and the vast majority of elected Members on the ground. We come in tonight and get the Minister of State's speech and the amendments, which I have not had a chance to go through in detail. The Minister of State is asking us to do this and for what?

I will speak about Galway. One major problem is the excessive power in the hands of management - unelected people. The second major problem is the lack of oversight by the Department regarding the lack of a master plan in Galway. We have higgledy-piggledy developer-led development, no master plan and no oversight by the Department. The former Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Coveney, agreed with me when I stated during Leaders' Questions that Galway has returned to developer-led development. The site at Ceannt Station is over 14 acres, eight of which are being developed by a person on behalf of Ceannt Station completely in isolation from the public lands in the docks and the other public lands in Galway. The Government seems to think this is okay. I ask myself why I talk about this and go into the minutiae of it when the major problems in Galway are lack of democracy; the fact that when decisions are made by local councillors, they are ignored; a major housing crisis; and a major traffic problem. All of these problems have solutions. We have proposed solutions. I do not come in here and object for the sake of objecting. I come in here with solutions relating to Galway. A total of 22,000 people signed a petition. I am actually underestimating the number. I collected the signatures with a committed number of people on the ground, most of whom are non-political, that said we should not put in another road and we should look at public transport, including light rail, particularly in the context of Galway, which has an opportunity to be a thriving but green city. What do we get? We get ignored and told that it is not possible.

Park and ride has never been implemented. We put it in our city development plan in 2005 and it has never been rolled out while traffic congestion builds up. Until this year, we had not built a single local authority house since 2009. These are the real problems on the ground. I will not go into the hospitals issue; it is for another day. Yet the Minister of State has us looking at a Bill that has metamorphosed into a completely different Bill and is asking us to approve it and push forward to committee level as quickly as possible. This is not democracy. This is a diversion from the real problems on the ground but, most importantly, it is an undermining of democracy at local level that will put more and more power into the hands of unelected officials in the guise of directly elected mayors. I am particularly upset when something is done under false pretences. We are talking about directly elected mayors but there is no mention of the powers they might have or how they might interact with the system on the ground. I have the greatest of concerns about these proposals and I do not think this is the way to proceed.

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