Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. I was struck by the opening lines of his speech in which he spoke about the great reform Act of 1832. While he says this legislation might not rank with that, he sees it in historic terms. I do not wish to accuse the Minister of hubris, but there is a governmental hubris underlying that assertion, just as there was with the proposed referendum to abolish the Seanad. On each occasion there was a grand claim of reform, appealing to some type of historical legacy or the Government holding itself out as sitting in a great tradition of reforming legislation. However, as with the proposal to abolish the Seanad, which was the most shallow of political proposals and was grounded not in an aspiration to reform, but in an attempt to exercise a populist manoeuvre, we see the same here again. It is a grab at relevance, an attempt by the Government to portray itself as doing democracy and our system of government a great service. In reality, it is only doing damage because of the crudeness and shallowness of what is proposed.

I welcome the opportunity to engage with the Minister on this, and I listened with interest to the contributions of my fellow Senators. I also followed the debates that took place in the Lower House. However, I have not heard a response from the Government to many of the fine suggestions being made. In fact, I am more inclined to think we need a national government reform Bill rather than one which focuses exclusively on local government structures.

In many ways, this Bill is extraordinary in its scope and ambition. I acknowledge that. In fact, if they were the criteria by which one could measure the usefulness of legislation, the Bill would be an astounding success. However, many people have expressed their concern about the size and impenetrability of the Bill. Even the Labour Party has said that more scrutiny is required. The Bill has 65 sections and involves major structural changes. It has been noted that the Bill received a recent addition to its Title, with the inclusion of the word "reform". I have made my comment about that. It is almost a case of where one is explaining, one is losing. Despite having 200 pages and pedantic detail, there is no sense of a truly reforming character in the Bill. The opposite is what comes through loud and clear to local democratic representatives throughout the country. There is no respect for their role and no respect for local democracy. They regard this legislation as deeply regressive, leading to a greater centralisation of national government power and control. Local government is not being reformed by the Government in this legislation, it is being attacked.

We are getting the opposite to what we need, which is genuine devolution of power to the regions and to people. What comes across in this legislation and in everything the Government is doing is that not only does officialdom, by which I mean the permanent government and particularly the elected Government, not trust the people, it also does not care what they think. That is the reason we have the most centralised system in Europe, as Senator Daly and others said, and that is the reason this Government wants it to stay that way. There is an arrogance attached to this Government and its super majority.

Consider the British system and the Barnett formula for deciding what to give the regions in subventions. Effectively, the tax take of the country is pooled, the money is dished out to regions on the basis of a formula and the regional assemblies spend it. Would that not be great in Ireland? Instead of taking health, education and, latterly, water responsibilities from local government, as has been done in recent years, there could be a genuine desire to resource local government and to bring forward people in the community who could take local decisions and decide on local priorities - that might be to keep Garda stations open, in preference to other goods they might consider to be of lesser importance in that region - and use public resources to implement those decisions. That would be genuine democracy. It would be genuinely in keeping with the principle of subsidiarity, which is a classically Christian democratic principle. Fine Gael claims to be a Christian democratic party and is allied with the European People's Party, EPP, in the EU, but there is nothing about subsidiarity in this Bill. If one thinks that giving the county manager the glorified name of chief executive officer furthers the cause of local participation in democracy, that is naive. It is not even subsidiarity in name.

Ireland is a small country, but we still have a situation where decisions are too centralised and too influenced by the chatter in Dublin. Decisions about education and local authority rates and so forth should be made at the most local level possible. There have been a number of reports on improving local government. Buried somewhere in one of them was a fascinating discussion on regional authorities and what they could do. However, what do we see? The Government is getting rid of town councils, cutting the number of councillors and amalgamating local authorities. That is not reform and pruning the system, but attacking it. It is not using a secateurs but a chainsaw.

I strongly believe in local government reform and I would like to see it happen. Consider the German federal system of Länder. The Länder decide how long the school day is, the education curriculum in the school and so forth. It is interesting to note in passing that in Plato's The Republic the ideal republic was a city state of 50,000 free men, with apologies to the women representatives here. Plato was not up to date on either the emancipation of slaves or the participation of women. However, the concept was that people in a democracy would know each other, and the ideal structure was one in which people knew each other and were participating and working with each other. This legislation takes us further away from all that. Fundamentally, there is a mistrust of people and, worse, a mistrust of their capacity to be effective agents of local government.

The criticisms of this legislation are not the reactionary mutterings of an outdated political class of local councillors, who might say anything to protect their interests, their local fiefdoms, their local status or the mayoral chain they get to wear when the camogie team returns to the town. It is not about anything so petty. The objections to this legislation are the articulation of the rational and clear-sighted fears held by experienced practitioners in local democracy. Even if we allow that there is a level of self-interest within some of those who have raised objections to this Bill and the "Putting People First" document on which it was based, serious and valid concerns would still remain in terms of the consequences of the Bill becoming law.

This is certainly not a plea for the status quo. As with the Seanad abolition debate, those who oppose what the Government is proposing believe passionately, definitely more passionately than the Government does, in authentic reform.

That is a given. The question which arises is whether the Bill facilitates authentic reform or impedes it. The Minister is on the record as stating that the key objective of the local government reform programme was to address weaknesses in the existing system, including issues identified in the report on local democracy in Ireland adopted by the Council of Europe's Congress of Local and Regional Authorities in October 2013. The weaknesses to which I refer include the need for wider devolution of functions to local government, greater subsidiarity at local level, greater financial discretion for local authorities and increased consultation with local authority member associations.

Let us consider the objective of encouraging greater subsidiarity at local government level, particularly as the support or neglect of this principle by our national Government is really a litmus test of its commitment to work towards other objectives. The general aim behind the principle of subsidiarity is to guarantee a degree of independence for local authorities in respect of central government. This, therefore, involves a sharing of powers among several levels of authority. I am afraid that the recent experience relating to this House does nothing to give us comfort that the Government is serious about sharing power with those at the local levels of democratic representation. This goes to the heart of the fears being voiced in respect of this matter. Chambers Ireland has stated that a key concern for businesses with regard to the Bill revolves around the fact that responsibility for setting of commercial rates and increasing charges, such as those relating to parking in town centres, will be removed from local authorities This legislation does not give back to local authorities, it actually takes away from them. These are not trite concerns. In practice, subsidiarity means that local autonomy on a range of issues is respected by central government. Nothing in the legislative programme of this Government demonstrates that it takes this concept seriously or - when it invokes the term - sees it as anything other than ideological window-dressing.

The relevant provisions in the Bill contradict the guiding principle outlined by the local government efficiency review group in its final report of July 2010, which the Government committed to implement in April 2011. One of the three guiding principles set down states that local authorities, regardless whether they are running all publicly-funded activities in their areas, should have a lead role in overseeing them or in their provision. This is a principle which the Government appears to have forgot but which local representatives have not. The trend to date on the Government's part is towards increased centralisation of services, a copperfastening of the power of the Executive at the expense of the legislative arm and a reluctance to implement meaningful reform.

The Minister has stated that reform of local government will save the taxpayer €420 million during the next four years and lead to a 40% reduction-----