Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Earlier this week, Owen Keegan raised the spectre of increased parking charges, increased rates and increased tolls in Dublin City Council, as he saw it, because of the under-funding of local government. In Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown this week, the new Fianna Fáil, Green Party, Labour Party and Social Democrats controlled council increased rates by 3.5%, increased parking charges and, interestingly, given the Green Party involvement, cut entirely the home retrofit budget, cut the environmental awareness budget and cut the community grants budget. This is fairly astonishing, frankly. Naturally, People Before Profit opposed such a shocking budget and proposed an alternative, which is that the refund scheme for vacant properties should be limited to one year so people do not get a break for leaving a property empty, which would put pressure on the owners of property to open up the empty premises that blight Dún Laoghaire and many other town and village centres across the country.

While I do not always agree with Owen Keegan, has he got a point? Local government is chronically under-funded. The property tax has not resolved or, indeed, assisted in any way in giving increased funding to local government. The consequences of that are going to be very damaging economically for Dublin city centre and for town and village centres throughout the country, such as Dún Laoghaire, where SMEs are struggling. This is not the way forward. We need additional funding from central Government to go into local government to secure local services and the future of town and village centres.

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