Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I oppose the proposed wages of the democratically elected mayors. The proposal is that the new elected mayors in Cork, Limerick, and Waterford be paid a salary of €130,000 per annum and that they will be able to draw down vouched allowances of €16,000. The newly elected mayors will also bring with them a special adviser with a salary of just under €67,000 per year, a programme officer with a salary of just under €67,000 per year and they can have a driver with a salary of €35,000 a year. The grand total is €314,000 there or thereabouts per council or more than €940,000 between the three councils. Addressing this issue the Tánaiste stated:

The salary is at that rate because it needs to be. This will be a serious, full-time job that will require a lot of energy, a lot of drive, 14-hour days.

I put the rather obvious point that there are plenty of serious full-time jobs that require a lot of energy, a lot of drive and 14-hour days but which do not pay €130,000 a year or anything like it. That salary will certainly set any newly elected mayor apart from the people who elect them. How can it be otherwise when a mayor lives on an income 13 times the size of the income of a single person on social welfare, 6.5 times the income of a worker on the minimum wage or 3.5 times the income of a worker on the average wage. The Tánaiste knows as well as I do that a lord mayor on an elite wage, and that is an elite wage, is more likely to identify with the elite in Irish society than with the people who elect him or her, and perhaps that is the reason for the sky-high wage. Either way, that is gravy-train politics of the highest order.

The Ceann Comhairle asked for a Cork perspective and the feedback I and other Deputies have been getting is that there is opposition to the proposed wage.

That is to put it mildly. There is a reasonably high level of anger and disgust at that proposal. If the Government wanted the proposal to be defeated, it would have a hard job to come up with a proposal that is linked to it that would have more of an effect than that particular proposal.

The proposal for directly elected mayors is not without its positive aspects. I like the idea of some of the powers of an unelected chief executive officer being transferred to an elected person and I like the idea of getting away from the pass the parcel game that is played in so many councils with the lord mayor's position, and giving that power to the people. Having said that, there are also negatives around the proposal and they are not insignificant, apart altogether from the wage. If one looks at the lord mayor positions in a city such as London or in big cities in the United States, they are executive style positions and the mayors tend to rise above, not just the unelected officials in the council, but the elected councillors themselves.

The key issue for councils is not addressed in the legislation, namely, the question of the real powers that have been stripped from councils with neoliberal policies over the past ten, 15 and 20 years with the bins, the water services and housing maintenance. The privatisation programme that has been driven through and that needs to be reversed is the key issue facing our local authorities if we want to give real power back to councillors and democratically elected people.

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