Pat Moylan (Fianna Fail)

This amendment has afforded us an opportunity for debate, but we dealt with a Local Government Bill last year and had a considerable debate on it. I welcome the opportunity to look at such a Bill again within 12 months to tighten or relax various provisions.

We now have SPCs throughout the country, but we also have ADMs, the Leader programme and enterprise boards. I know the Minister's Department and others will examine this and shift the authority vested in many of those bodies to local authorities. Everything cannot happen over night. I was a member of a local authority when we had the local committees on agriculture and health. They vanished and we continued without them. In many cases Departments wanted to do something in local authority areas and had to set up ADMs, for example, because local authority members probably did not have time to attend any more meetings or do any more work at local authority level.

The Minister is saying, rightly, that when Oireachtas Members are no longer on local authorities, those authorities will have to work on a full-time basis discussing the problems and issues in their counties. We have an ADM in our county doing something about rural transport. The problem is that the Ministers have allocated money, but over half of this is spent on renting a premises and administration. Therefore, we will not benefit although a considerable sum of money has been made available.

This Bill is a move in the right direction because the section in question will give us a chance to think and allow the Minister to determine what issues must be addressed by a Bill similar to this one.