Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for the clarification. It is important that people are not just going through the motions or that they are in just a few times a year. That is useful.

I have talked about recommendation 8, which concerns the mayor having the power to select and appoint members of staff to their office. Recommendation 9 refers to sanctions or removal of the director general in the event of underperformance or, indeed, inhibiting the role of the directly elected mayor. That is a very important recommendation. While it varies across the country, it is not unusual for chief executives in local authorities, in many situations, to refuse to do as councillors are requesting or directing. There can absolutely be legitimate reasons for that but there can also be times when it is not legitimate.

Recommendation 10 suggests a directly elected mayor will be able to reassign responsibilities of directors of services. This is a very important recommendation. In terms of what priorities a local authority has and what areas it prioritises, how the directors of services are aligned and what areas of responsibility they have will be very important to the direction of a local authority. A directly elected mayor may have a mandate from the people to make sure economic development is key in that local authority and if there is not a director of services for economic development, it will be very hard for the mayor to progress that. For example, another local authority recently switched to having a director of services in the specific area of active travel because the local authority wanted to make it a real priority. If someone runs for election and says he or she is going to be all about active travel and that is going to be his or her main priority, how do such people execute that if they are not able to say, “I want to have a director of services for active travel and I want to be able to work with them and with the Department on that area”? They can put it in the plan and all the rest but the directly elected mayor is going to have difficulties if the executive is not with him or her on this.

I also make the point that we need to beef up the executive authority of the mayor and make it closer to the 2019 report on the vision of the role. With regard to the mayor’s control over the director general in specific policy spaces, including powers to fire an underperforming director general, if necessary, so a director general cannot ignore a mayor and what the people have voted for, that area needs more work.

I want to highlight a few other areas on which I may bring forward amendments. With regard to the delegation of functions of the mayor to the director general under section 27, I think this could be questionable. Given the limited powers that a directly elected mayor has, except in very limited circumstances, why would a mayor be delegating those back to the director general? I wonder about that.

On the issue of the removal of the mayor, I question whether the thresholds are very high in practice. Part 5 of the Bill, under head 107, deals with reimbursement of election spend for candidates who receive 25% of a quota. Given this is a single-seat constituency, I would argue that is a very high threshold. It is the norm in multi-seat constituencies but the effect in a single-seat constituency is that it is very high. If it means reimbursement only for the most successful candidates with the biggest backing and excludes everyone else, that is problematic. It is certainly not the equivalent of what we have in multi-seat constituencies and the percentage would be much lower if we were to do it as an equivalent for multi-seat constituencies.

Part 6 deals with plebiscites for other local authorities to decide on whether they have a directly elected mayor. There are three methods for this, that is, through the Minister, through a petition or by having it initiated with a report from the corporate policy group. I question why the full council cannot initiate the process. One could read the legislation and say the full council is not prohibited from doing that. However, the fact that it states that the corporate policy group will prepare a report and bring it to the full council could also be interpreted as meaning that the full council cannot pass a resolution saying it wants the report to be brought. If a majority of the full council wants to initiate the process, it should be able to do so. That should be explicit in the legislation rather than a view arising that the full council cannot do that and that only the corporate policy group can do it. While the corporate policy group is broadly representative, it is not always fully representative of the full council.

On the petition, it is great that a petition method is included and I do not think the threshold should be low but a requirement of 20% of the electorate is almost impossible. If we think about how to gather that, you would need to knock on the door of every household in the entire local authority area. You would probably get an answer rate of about one in five and then, at every door that opens, all of them would want to say “Yes”. To actually get 20%, you would need to knock at every household in the local authority area twice to achieve it. We all know from our own experience in elections, in rural areas and all the rest, how difficult it is to get to some houses. That is probably an impossible task. While I am not asking for a low threshold and it should be high, when we think about the practicalities, 20% is probably impossible.

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