Paul Bradford (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, who is from Tipperary. It is the Minister from Tipperary who will make the final decision on the future of local government and the future of town councils. Some people say Irish Water will be the legacy of EU Commissioner Hogan but the legacy with which he will be most associated, and it will be negative unless there are changes, are the new structures of local government. There were elections to new local government structures in 2013 but those structures are a butchered, slimmed-down version of local democracy. The public spin was that we were going to manage local politics with fewer councillors so town councils were abolished and replaced by municipal districts. All of us have served on local authorities and all of us know the importance of localism to local government but we now have local authority areas which, in some cases, are 50, 60 or 70 miles long and that is not local government. The savings from abolishing town councillors, who were on modest stipends, were cancelled out by creating additional county councillors and it is already apparent in many of our huge municipal districts that the current structures are not working.

I am the first to recognise that town councils in some areas were not working well. There were five town councils in my former constituency of Cork East. Some worked very well but some less so and such a ratio would be replicated across the country. On the whole, though, in the past 100 years town councils were the first recourse of politics and representation for tens of thousands of our citizens. The person who walked up and down the main street of Cashel or Mallow always felt comfortable walking into the town hall to meet town council officials. Sometimes they met town councillors, whom they often met on a daily basis anyway because they generally worked around the town. There was great interaction between local politics and the local community.

I was very pleased to hear at the weekend from certain members of the Labour Party that consideration was being given to putting town councils back in place. We will have to plan it in a very strategic fashion. I have said to Senators down the years that if they went into the Oireachtas Library they would find the 1991 Barrington report on local government, which was accepted and agreed by virtually every political party at that time. It proposed the replacement of town councils across the country by district councils with general populations of between 25,000 and 30,000, small geographical areas where the councillor would be local to his or her constituents. That is one option, but new supercouncils, such as Cork County Council with 55 members, Dublin City Council with over 60 members and west Cork, which is 70 or 80 miles long and larger than most Dáil constituencies, are not local government.

There were difficulties with town councils, though some were excellent. Some of the larger towns in the country did not have town councils while some small towns had functioning town councils but we need to look afresh at the structure. It is nearly four years until the next local elections and we need to flag our intentions for local government at an early stage. At a time when we are lecturing Europe on the need to practise devolution of powers down to smaller countries and communities, in this country we have taken power away from small towns and communities and from local citizens.

I appreciate the fact that the Minister of State will not make the political call on this matter but he was aware of the great work done in Cashel, Tipperary, Carrick-on-Suir and other town councils in his constituency. I hope some serious consideration is being given to the question by the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Alan Kelly, and the Government and that it was not just a conference slogan. Nobody can blame the previous Minister for making the decision he made and if people in politics are wrong it is not a sin. Such decisions can be reversed. I hope we will look at local government in a meaningful fashion to restructure it to give the citizens of this country what they need and deserve.