John Paul Phelan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I absolutely accept the Deputy’s point on directors of services. There is no point in divesting the chief executive role without doing something similar with the director of services role. That is absolutely right. I am not going to get involved in the specific case in Dublin but the Deputy went on further to give out that Dublin was not included. The reason for Dublin’s non-inclusion is that it is different from the rest of the country.

It is complicated by the fact that there are four local authorities. Where do we fit the directly elected mayor's piece into the rest? Deputy Ó Broin said it was a good idea. He questioned how it would interact with the existing structure. I give a commitment to him and to Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, who spoke later, that once the Government has considered the memo, we will come back.

I completely refute the argument that somehow this will be a platform for personalities or sports people to be elected. The public will have the power to elect whoever it wants. If it is a sports person, a personality, a regular Joe, a business person or whoever, we cannot second guess that. Deputy O'Sullivan went into detail and said that the mayor should be somebody from Limerick city. The directly elected mayor will be a person elected by the people of Limerick city and county. That might be somebody from Abbeyfeale. In the context of population distribution, one might think it unlikely to be a person from Abbeyfeale, but I would not prescribe that it would have to be somebody from the city who is elected to hold the position.

Deputy Wallace is correct on the issue of groupthink and it is never any harm for someone to say something different. People may sometimes accuse Deputy Wallace of saying something different just for the sake of saying something different. I would never do such a thing. The Deputy is also right about local government reform. The move to take some of the control in local government and give it to those who have been directly elected is a substantial local government reform. Deputy Wallace quoted Tony Blair, of whom he is not a fan, and it was interesting that he thinks that local government works in the United States of America and in Britain. It does not work. The Deputy also referred to the Hartlepool United football mascot H'Angus the monkey. I must inform the House that H'Angus was not a directly elected mayor with executive powers. The mascot was directly elected but did not have the executive powers.

Deputy Eamon Ryan welcomed the plebiscites but expressed reservations about Dublin's exclusion. The Deputy was absolutely right when he referred to the opportunity that exists in our regional cities to develop those city centres again, especially in the case of brownfield sites that exist in many of those city centres. In my own city of Kilkenny the brewery site is to be redeveloped. There are cities in those regions that have dockland sites. The north quays in Waterford form one such very prominent site with a huge city centre location that can bring businesses in and people back to live in our city centres. I have never once questioned that Waterford is the capital of the south east and it will help the rest of the region. It has always struck me that the south east lags behind the rest of the State economically despite having some obvious advantages. Part of the reason is the lack of coherence when viewing it as a region in comparison with the west.

Deputy Ryan spoke in favour of the new procurement framework-style bidding system for the funding of projects at local level into the future, and he emphasised the focus on certain areas such as transport, planning, enterprise, policing and education. One of my predecessors, the European Commissioner, Mr. Phil Hogan, gets a lot of criticism about his time as Minister, but he brought the enterprise issue directly into the remit of local government through the local enterprise offices. That was a positive measure and has worked very well. Is my time up?

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