Denis Landy (Labour)

I welcome the Minister to the House. He is welcome. I have no doubt he intends to move this process forward and I look forward to his deliberations. We have had a number of conversations on this issue in recent months.

Town local governments should be a fundamental tier of local democracy. Reform should place town local government at the core of the system and bring local government closer to communities. The intention should not be to abolish local government but to strengthen it. Reform must be based on a bottom-up approach. Local government needs to be less dependent budgetarily on central government, and a model of county and municipal government can advance the objective of operational efficiency and representational effectiveness. All those statements are ones the Minister made in a number of speeches he gave in recent months. I commend him on that. He has at heart a desire to reform local government. The question is how we approach that.

Currently, local government is being strangled to death by central government. Unless the grip is removed and oxygen is supplied urgently, local government will die. We have gone down a one way street in local government for the past ten to 15 years. The challenge for the Minister is to turn the vehicle of local government around and drive it back up that street. We have seen the powers of local government removed in the areas of health, education, waste management, roads, water, funding and so forth. Are we going to reform by returning some of these powers along with giving new powers or will we reform by a reduction in powers?

Reduction has been tried across Europe. The previous speaker spoke about some instances. I will give the Minister some statistics. In the 1970s in Britain, for example, there were 1,300 local authority units and there are now 361; in Wales there were 45 but now there are 32; in Scotland there were 65 and there are now 32. In Northern Ireland it was proposed on two occasions to reduce the number of local government units from 26 to 11. Strangely, Sinn Féin did not support that. It wanted the number reduced to seven. No decision has yet been made there. In all instances where the number of units has been reduced it has not been proved conclusively that they are more efficient. The previous speaker referred to the document "Is big really so efficient? Investigating assumptions concerning local government reform and amalgamation." It should be read by every Senator who has an interest in this subject.

International experience shows that what is happening across Europe, excluding Great Britain, is the opposite to what is happening in Ireland. In Norway, which has the same population as Ireland, there are 430 municipalities. In Croatia, which has a similar population, there are 420. The powers of local government across Europe are completely different from those of local government in this country. Local government has more meaning. I served for six and a half years on the Committee of the Regions, which is the local government arm of the European project, and I saw at first hand the power and autonomy of local government across European countries. In fact, some of my colleagues in the Socialist group were gobsmacked when we discussed how little power Irish local representatives have.

I cannot agree with the Minister's comment on town councils. There is nothing to support it. He said that town councils are currently inefficient. His exact words were: "we must honestly acknowledge that the sub-county level has become an increasingly marginalised element of the local government system, with problems of weakness, duplication and inconsistency". I put it to the Minister that town local government is far more efficient than the current country structure. I ask him to conduct a little research in his Department on figures that were produced on the provision of housing in County Kildare in recent years. They show that Kildare County Council was six times less efficient than Athy Town Council in the provision of housing.

Democracy carries out a business but it is not a business. I urge the Minister to remember that. I wish him well in his deliberations. There is much work to be done but I believe that if we work together, we can find a better local government system for this country.