Maurice Cummins (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister argued that the enhanced metropolitan area will greatly enhance the gateway status of Waterford. We agree to differ on that but the Minister might comment on that at a later stage. Better Local Government was introduced a number of years back by the other side of the House but who did it benefit? We had an extra layer of bureaucracy where hundreds of people in local authorities were given a salary of over ¤100,000. That was its form of better local government. This harks back to the point raised by Senator Barrett. There are people within local authorities on inflated salaries while the general worker seems to be suffering and has suffered over the past ten years.

This Minister is introducing radical reforms. We have already seen the Electoral (Amendment)(Political Funding) Act 2012, which deals with gender quotas. The area of local authorities will be another radical reform. One will never get full agreement. The time for councillors to submit their reports to the Boundary Commission is fairly short but that should have been done by councils over the past month or two. It has only been introduced and given by managers to councillors when they have a very short period of time in which to submit their proposals, which is unfair. If one goes to any council in the country and asks it to agree to the break up of boundaries, one will not get very much unanimity from any council one contacts.

They are the situations we face but there is no doubt that the greater streamlining of services at local level will end unnecessary duplication. Let us be honest about this. We have seen a considerable amount of duplication that should be streamlined. Some people here question why we should give more stringent powers and responsibility to councillors in dealing with the one-stop-shop for enterprise. They are the very Senators coming into the House looking for more powers for councillors yet now they are saying they are not good enough to administer bodies under the umbrella of local authorities. There is a lot of double speak here. On one hand, they are advocating one thing and saying something different on the other.