Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am afraid I have not seen the report and I was not notified that Deputy Collins was going to raise it. Therefore, it is difficult for me to comment on it but I will take a look at it in the coming days. I wonder whether it is a comparison of all the local authorities in Ireland because it is the case that quite a number of Dublin local authorities do not receive much in Government grants. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown is an obvious one and my county council in Fingal has received very little, almost nothing, in Government grants for road maintenance, for example, for a particular reason. That is because wealthier local authorities receive less funding than less well-off local authorities, for example, those in the west and very rural local authorities.

If one looks at the way local authorities are funded, they get their funding from a number of sources. There are grants from central Government. There is the local property tax, LPT, commercial rates and there are things like development levies and charges. Local authorities control three of those four streams and can raise money if they chose to through the LPT, through commercial rates, through development levies and other charges. One stream comes from central Government, so when one looks at how much money local authorities have, to suggest that it is all about how much they get in central grants from Government is to misunderstand and misrepresent the situation, because local authorities have a lot of control over how much funding they have. They set the LPT and the commercial rate and they decide on things like development levies and charges. While many authorities receive a lot of Government grants, it is the local authorities that are least well off that tend to receive the most per capita, and that is how public spending generally works in a democracy such as ours.

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