Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Limerick people voted for this in good faith in 2019. Waterford and Cork did not. I heard a Deputy for Waterford say they were going to watch what happens in Limerick. That is a poor enough way to have your aspirations delivered or achieved. There is a total imbalance of power. The power in this country rests here in central government. I am good friends with Deputy O'Callaghan, who said a minute ago that we can ask questions of the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste here. However, neither of them bothered to turn up today, on the first day of the session. It is an ungracious insult to the people of this country that one of them could not be here, if not both. We had our break. It is the first time in the history of the State that this happened. It just goes to show what they think of this House and the elected people.

To get back to the local authorities, the powers of the councillors have been stripped away. Under this half-baked plan, the mayor, whoever he or she might be, will be allowed to spend €68,000 or €70,000 in expenses to get elected. There is no point in electing a mayor and not letting him or her have powers. The simple reason is that the Local Government Management Agency, LGMA, which has a place here in Dublin on the Luas line, is the power base. We see it with the retained firefighters whom I met with last night in Bray. They are still fighting to get recognition. The Minister tells us he wants it sorted out. The LGMA will not sort it out. The LGMA is the powerhouse in this country. It has stripped away the powers that the councils had. Many of them are good people but they stripped away the powers the councils had and they treat councillors as whipping boys and girls. It is shocking.

That needs to change and we need to get back to regional development and regional government and elect a mayor with proper, functional powers. A mayor is accountable to the people. He or she can be kicked out, but the managers cannot be.

A sad day under a Government the Minister of State supported was in 2014, when we took away borough district councils. It was a lamentable day for local government. It was done by the then Minister, Phil Hogan, and supported by all the Government backbenchers at the time. We forced Tipperary to be amalgamated. The Electoral Commission has now decided to divide it in two because it is too big and cannot function properly. We forced the county together and there are now 40 councils, which is just not functional. We gave away powers to Irish Water, a most untransparent body that left Clonmel and 40,000 people without water for 40 days this summer. It was the wettest summer we have had, yet we could not keep water in the pipes. Irish Water is not accountable. It will not meet or talk to people and it does not know where the pipes are. It rarely knows where the reservoirs are. It told us a reservoir was closed, that it was dysfunctional and that there was something wrong with it but there was no report backing up that. That was a sad day for democracy in this country. Someone mentioned earlier the 100th anniversary of our democracy. The powers are being stripped away. We will put down amendments to the Bill seeking to have proper powers given to this mayor with, I hope, leadership whereby mayors will be directly elected in every county. They should be able to look after the counties and have powers, without councils having to go cap in hand.

Since the councils in Tipperary were amalgamated, every meeting is preceded by a workshop. It is workshop, workshop, workshop. When I was a councillor, we had one workshop a year and it was not even called a "workshop" but a "budget meeting". These workshops are held behind closed doors. Why is the press locked out? Why will Irish Water not meet us? It had a workshop with councillors but it never discusses anything in front of the press. What is it hiding? We have a lot to make up here in regard to our situation in our country. People are clamouring to get power back to the people. It is our job here to demand that, but the Government and LGMA are guarding the power.

The public is yearning for this. Why do we have such poor turnouts in local elections in some parts of our country? I salute the councils for the work they do, despite the big areas they cover and the workload they have, but they cannot deal with Irish Water, the HSE or the agencies that have been set up as a buffer between elected representatives and the people. It is lamentable and sad that, when there is an opportunity such as in this Bill, which the Government was forced to produce because the public in Limerick demanded it, that the Bill is no good, even though it has taken four years to get this far, and it will be five or six before it is implemented. It is not worth the pain and effort if, as Deputy O'Donoghue said, he or she will not have the budget or, above all, the powers to make decisions and take power out of the powerhouse off O'Connell Street, namely, the LGMA. It is running this country, not governments.

It is the same as when Ministers come in and are ambitious. The Minister of State's successor is going to have several officials in this office to steer this new mayor. It is the same with civil servants when Ministers enter office. Two more civil servants got massive pay increases this week, including one in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage when the Government has failed to meet any housing targets in the past 12 years. They have the arrogance to look for a rise and the Minister with responsibility has the petulance and the audacity to give them that rise. That is where our power has gone completely wrong.

It is no wonder our people are despondent. They can see people who are barely able to survive, to put food on the table, to clothe their families or to aspire to own a house. The Government first gave bankers their bonuses back and now it is giving these pay increases to these people. Who do they think they are? They are good people in their own right - I am not knocking them in that way - but they are not worth that kind of money. If they are delivering, there should a barometer measuring what they have achieved, and maybe there should be pay cuts when they do not achieve. Otherwise, we are not going to have any change. We are going to carry on in our merry-go-round and 100 years into our freedom, we are back with these people with their hands on the handlebars of power and a jackhammer would not get them off them. That is the way with both senior civil servants and the LGMA.

I was down at the LGMA's office. I was one of three charged with appointing a communications committee as part of the Government of 2007 to 2011. When we arrived for the interviews, everything had been sorted out for us. I happened to be the chairman of the interviews but they told me they had a shortlist of the top 20 candidates. I thanked them very much and asked them what we were there for. They were all retired senior public servants. We turned the box upside down, we started from the bottom and we did the job we were supposed to do, but that does not happen too often. We never got the opportunity again. That is where the power is.

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