John Paul Phelan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To answer many of the questions, the report from Government is just a report from Government. There will have to be legislation to follow up on that. The Bill we debated in the House mandates that the Minister has to reflect the outcome of the plebiscites in the report that he or she gives to Government, and the legislation on establishing the role will go into detail as to pay, in particular, but also the extent of functions.

The issue of a lack of information is the classic political red herring for when there is no argument against something. The referendum commission on divorce has not launched its campaign yet. The plebiscite commission launched its campaign in the three cities on Monday. We are restricted by the judgements in the McKenna and McCrystal cases as to the information that the Government can put out. We have to give both sides of the argument. I have not heard of any other political grouping groupings either launch or moot a launch of a campaign on the issue.

While I get on well with Senator Boyhan, most of his contribution had nothing to do with the regulations or to do with this issue. He stated that I had sat on a report on the local property tax, LPT. This is the responsibility of the Department of Finance. I can assure the Senator that there has been no such sitting, as it were.

There were multiple consultations with representative groups of councillors on the Moorhead report, and those groups felt that this report should not be published during a local election campaign. If the Senator was in touch with his councillors, he might be aware of that. What the people are being asked is effectively a public consultation on the question of whether they favour the idea of a directly elected mayor in those three areas, nothing more, nothing less. If the Senator states that his position is that he does favour such a role, then the idea that he is campaigning against it, just-----