Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for attending this debate. I hope he takes on board what we say today. I was a councillor in the west Mayo area for seven years and, as has been said, the role of the councillor is changing all the time. I disagree with the urban versus rural issue. We have to be careful about that in terms of making chalk of one and cheese of the other. The role of a councillor is challenging regardless of where one is. For me, the challenge was that the area stretched to 123 km or a four hour round trip and being acutely conscious that one had to serve all of the area equally across the constituency. This is a challenge for rural councillors.

What challenges people across the board is the role of the councillor in trying to deal with very serious issues and in trying to fill in the gaps that exist because services are not provided. One might be dealing with a young person with mental health problems, the lack of infrastructure, education and, increasingly, with health problems. A councillor tries to serve all these roles. I commend all the councillors across the country who are doing Trojan work trying to support the people in their communities. They spend a huge amount of time doing this work. They are also dealing with people in extreme poverty and as a result they are often reluctant to come forward and say they cannot afford to do their job any longer. Other good people would like to be public representatives but the fact is that they cannot afford to do it. How could somebody who is trying to bring up children alone, for example, or in other situations become a councillor? Financially, people cannot do it, and it is a huge loss to society and to politics that they are barred from doing it. Are we going to end up with people who are elderly, and there is nothing wrong with that, and people who are already financially secure? That would be wrong. We need new and diverse voices. We need people at different stages of their life cycles to be public representatives at local and other levels.

I wish to focus in particular on councillors who are rearing a young family and trying to pay a mortgage and all the bills. Many of these councillors cannot access family income supplement, FIS, payment because their local authority cannot confirm that they work over 19 hours per week in order to qualify. If they have no other employment, they are relying on their representational payment of €302 per week. I thank all the councillors across the board who have contacted me about this and the other matters that affect them. One councillor I spoke to has three children. His spouse is not working and he is a full-time councillor. As the hours he works cannot be confirmed he is losing €98.40 per week. That is not right. Social Justice Ireland produced a report last week on 100,000 people living in consistent poverty in this country. Many of our councillors are in the working poor bracket, the people who are working day and night but cannot afford to pay the bills.

It was mentioned somewhere that a councillor works about 20 hours per week. I guarantee that I would never have stopped being a county councillor if all that was required was to work 20 hours per week. We all know that a councillor works well over 60 hours per week - I can speak for the hours I put into it - when one takes account of the meetings, the municipal district, the workshops and the myriad other occasions one has to attend. In addition, sometimes people are under the impression that when one attends an event as a councillor one is paid to do that. A great deal of material is put out in the media with regard to headline figures for what councillors earn and so forth, without looking into how much actually goes into their pockets. I worked it out on one occasion and I probably should not have done it, because I ended up calculating that I was being paid approximately €1 per hour as a councillor. I did the job because I loved doing it. It is a little like the curse of the cause because one gets into doing it and one wants to do more and more and to do one's best. Financially, however, that is what the rate was, and it is the rate for many councillors across the country. There has been an increase of €1,000 in salary and €2,000 in vouched expenses since then, but that has to be just a start.

I wish to clarify something relating to the vouched expenses. Some local authorities are requiring that home offices must be rateable offices before vouched allowance for home office and associated utilities will be paid. Can the Minister of State clarify that? I am perplexed as to why all the councils are not being compelled to implement the positive changes that have been made before now. Many young people who were elected in 2014 lack the support they require. That is the reason many councillors are leaving as well. Sometimes it can be put down to other issues but the enormity of the task they have to do without the resources they require to do the job is posing a problem. The aggregation of mileage returns becomes impossible when the entire spectrum of bodies has to be included.Very often councillors must represent their local authority at the last minute in front of bodies such as the Health Service Executive, education and training boards and regional assemblies etc., and this must be taken into account. New regulations on the annual fixed travel allowance are having an impact on councillors who were elected in 2014 and now must operate under this regime. That should be addressed. Many of these councillors also made financial predictions based on the system that was in place at the time of their election.

I could speak for much longer about this. It is not about "poor me" and we know so many people are in poverty in this country.