Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I listened carefully to the Minister. The first statement I would make is, is leor nod don eolach. A nod is a good as a wink. It is incumbent on Galway County Council to put forward radical proposals within the next two to three weeks about strengthening the municipal districts, and with that to make the request for the €4 million. I certainly will be calling on the local authority to do so. I thank the Minister of State for the invitation. I hope that the request, when it goes in, will be honoured.

On the bigger issue of funding, ní cheannófar muc i mála. We will not buy a pig in a poke. If the Minister of State thinks that someone like me would sign off on a promise of distant vague equality in terms of rights of citizens to equality of funding for local services, he has got it wrong. The Minister of State admitted in his speech that it is inequitable. He stated grandly that Galway is not the most inequitable and there are people who are suffering even greater pain than us. We will mobilise them too. If the Minister of State thinks we will either sign off on any change or indefinitely accept the situation where we are second-class citizens, that day is gone. Everybody should be treated equally. That would be akin to saying, as was said but was wrong and was eventually put right, that equal pay for men and women doing the same job in the public service is a nice aspiration but they will have to wait because we do not have the money.

There is an easy answer. Whatever money the Government has, and it is always finite, the Government should divvy it out equally or fairly. That should happen now. If there are losers because they were getting too much for a long time, they should bless their lucky stars for the lucky years and say that this is equity. If there are winners who have suffered for a long time, they will not be winners. They will be catching-up but will still be at a loss of years of underfunding. I am putting a marker down here today. Ní cheannófar muc i mála. Níl aon mhaith ann d'éinne teacht chugam le moltaí mura réiteofar ceist an airgid, mar a leagadh amach i dtuarascáil na saineolaithe.

The third point I want to make is that I respect expertise. I especially respect expertise when they can provide independent evidence for their assertions and where they have done research on the subject that they are pontificating on. The world is full of experts. Those experts normally have specialties and an expert eye doctor is not much good to a person who has a heart complaint.

There is another matter about which we are losing the run of ourselves. Democracy is about the people electing the decision-makers. It seems that democracy has become unfashionable in this country and we have decided that we will just become rubber stampers, so when we are elected to these Houses, maybe we should not be given computers or anything, just given a rubber-stamp that states, "the experts say", and leave out the human factors that often outweigh the so-called expert factors. If it was as simple as the Minister of State says and if this logic of amalgamating Galway city and county was so overridingly good for everybody, then of course we would have to amalgamate Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon to provide critical mass because the same principles that the expert would be looking at would apply there. I know why the Minister of State will not do that. It is because people have what experts would consider an irrational emotional attachment to their county and they would be marching on Dublin, not for some financial reason but for the emotional reason of loyalty to a geographic area that they call their county and for which they shout at GAA matches throughout the country. There are emotional issues, people issues or motivational issues that often overcome physical disadvantages that have to be taken into account in making decisions, and that is why we elect politicians. Politicians often have a better grasp of these issues than the so-called experts.

If the Minister of State got rash reports, as I know he did, that parts of Laois should go into Carlow, parts of Roscommon should go into Westmeath, and I know certainly that there was a favourable report to put a part of south Kilkenny into Waterford city to try to help the balance of hurling between Waterford and Kilkenny, then I am sure he can get experts who will objectively tell him that is what he should do. As for all that area just over the border from Waterford city, the Minister of State, Deputy Phelan, might know that the experts could propose that but he, as a Kilkenny man, knows that if he were to do that, he would be signing his death warrant in south Kilkenny as an elected representative because there are issues there that transcend all of this so-called expertise, and they are not bad, wrong or unimportant issues.

As a Minister, I always looked at the expert advice and I always took it into account. As a Deputy and a county councillor, I did the same. I am not one to ignore professional expert advice as long as I am satisfied that the professional expert is an expert in the subject concerned. Having done all of that, however, I then had to weigh up factors that they might not have taken into account, particularly human factors, and ask whether it still stood up. As the Minister of State said, and he must admit this, he will not put a bit of Kilkenny into Waterford, Laois into Carlow, or Roscommon into Westmeath to amalgamate it with Athlone. He will come up with another solution because he knows, as a politician, that no matter what a town planner tells him to do, it just will not work. Similarly in Galway, I know the county, the differences and the loyalties.

We have the right to point out that this proposal was wrong because it was a muc i mála job, badly thought out on a human level and unacceptable to the majority of public representatives across the country. One can be sure that if such a proportion of public representatives oppose a proposal, it is very likely that the same percentage of local people would have opposed it if it had gone to a plebiscite. There are no better people to understand the public mood than local public representatives.

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