Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to participate in this important debate. When the public and media discussion about Dublin city hit the headlines in recent weeks, one thing that struck me was that everybody was looking for somebody to blame. The reality is that in our capital city right now, nobody is really in charge. The way in which our system of local government is set up, councils, both management and especially elected representatives, have very limited powers. Far too much continues to be centralised in Departments. A multitude of agencies are responsible for a multitude of functions. The agencies control bits of the system but not all of it. I spoke to a transport policy expert once who asked me how many transport-related agencies operated in the city of Dublin. I thought there were maybe two, three or four. The answer is 40 and the city council is just one of those. If our system of local government is such that it has very limited power, if the few powers it has are predominantly executive and held by the non-elected members who are not democratically accountable, and if we continue to over-centralise in Departments and over-rely on fragmented public agencies as well as, increasingly, private agencies, it is no wonder that the city has the reputation it has.

I am a Dubliner and I love the city. I currently live in the suburbs and I want the city to be better. There are many good things about it. We could and must do much more, whether on public transport, housing, planning, public spaces crime, or community safety. We have to deal with the fundamental underlying structural problem, which is the weakness of our local government system. It is good that the Government established the Dublin Citizens' Assembly on a directly-elected mayor and future governance of Dublin city. That is welcome. The report is imminent and I look forward to it. Sinn Féin has long argued that we need directly-elected mayors.

If we are going to convince the public to introduce directly-elected mayors, we have to tell them clearly why, what powers the mayors will have and to what end. I had the good fortune of being involved in the last attempt to consider a directly-elected mayor for Dublin. The Acting Chair, Deputy Higgins, and I were on the council when we considered that. People may remember there was a working group made up of members from the four local authorities. We discussed and debated these issues among the four councils. Each council got to have a separate vote. If all four councils voted, there would be a plebiscite and the public would decide. The difficulty is that we were having a debate in a complete vacuum. While we were being asked if we wanted a directly-elected mayor, we had no idea what the Government's proposals were. The question of whether we wanted a directly-elected mayor was posed first. We were told that the White Paper on the functions of that office would come afterwards.

I completely understand the position of Fingal County Council, which feared that the limited powers that exist in local authorities would be sucked upwards into the office of the directly-elected mayor and it would lose what few functions it has. That would be a disaster and is why its members voted against this. We then had plebiscites of three cities. People were asked to support the idea of a directly-elected mayor while having no notion of what the mayor's functions or powers would be. How can we convince the electorate, which is already sceptical of politicians in many respects, to vote for a directly-elected mayor in Cork, Waterford or Limerick if we do not tell them what the role will do? While Limerick managed to pass the referendum by the skin of its teeth, we still do not have the legislation.

It is very rare that I compliment Members from the Chair's or the last speaker's party, Fine Gael, but Deputy Phelan produced a decent White Paper talking about the significant transfer of powers away from unelected officials to elected officials. There was much merit in that. The current Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, is keen to progress that but we know he is struggling with other Departments, which do not want to devolve power downwards to a different layer of administration. There is no value in mayors unless they have real powers and real authority.

Hopefully, the Dublin Citizens' Assembly will produce a recommendation to have a directly-elected mayor, subject to a plebiscite and the approval of the people of the city before any mayoral election, because I think people have to have their say. I would like to see a small number of important functions devolved to such an office in the first place, then to have a process of rolling devolution. For example, one could decide that transport will become a function of the mayor's office. Devolved powers of the Department of Transport and unelected bodies such as the National Transport Authority would instead be in the remit of a democratically-elected mayor. The value of that would be that a mayoral election would become a contest about how one wants the future of transport in our city to be run and managed. People can get elected, have a democratic mandate and then drive an agenda of change. Their careers will depend on them delivering on that. It is the same with the public realm, planning, housing and other areas as it is with transport.

I do not want any further loss of powers from our existing local authorities. Let us strengthen our local authorities, devolve powers to a directly-elected mayor and in all of the myriad issues we have discussed in this debate, let us put somebody in charge and give that person the power, authority, budgets and staff to drive a change agenda for our capital city.

Transport worked as a key issue for London and we could do the same here in Dublin. We would then start to see a much improved city for the people who live and work here and those who travel here. We would all be the better for it.

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