Brendan Ryan (Labour)

There are clearly good reasons to require Members of the Oireachtas or the European Parliament not to be members of the authority given that it is ultimately accountable to the Minister and the Oireachtas. However, there is no such relationship of accountability between the authority and local authorities and therefore the logic does not apply. There is no logic to excluding local authority members other than that somebody in the Office of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel has got it into his or her head that the exclusion ought to be extended to them. That is the first reason I support Senator Feighan's amendment.

The second reason concerns special policy committees, which now have significant influence on local authority policy-making. A member of a special policy committee who is not a local authority member could end up a member of the authority while the people who stick their necks out at elections and are elected to a local authority, as opposed to being appointed to special policy committee by some voluntary organisation, could not. This is not fair. It puts another obstacle in the way of people who get elected.

I have great regard for anybody who gets elected in a competitive election. Campaigning is never a pleasant task, be it for a local election in which one requires 100 votes, a presidential election in which one might require 500,000 or a European Parliament election, in which one might need 80,000. I was in the latter category but got 20,000. Those who contest elections do not deserve always to be denigrated by the Parliamentary Counsel.

I support the amendments. Senator Cummins stated some Ministers agree to such amendments and others do not. Perhaps the present Minister, Deputy O'Donoghue, will choose to agree. The Dáil will be in session for another week and it would not take long to sort out the Bill in that House.