Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I agree with Senators Ardagh and Boyhan about what is happening in Dublin. Dublin City Council is now spending the bones of €1 billion. It has 6,000 employees and has outsourced most of its contractual activities. The circumstances in which the manager can effectively confront the elected representatives and dispute their budget on the basis that the Custom House has cut back the resources available to Dublin city are unacceptable. Dublin City Council needs to be reformed dramatically. Local government in Dublin is a bit of a sham. Many people are doing work which in the past was done by direct employees of Dublin City Council. Staff of the council are supervising other people but we are not getting value for money.

As far as the local property tax is concerned, there are people who live in modest former artisan dwellings up lanes in Dublin 2, 4, 6 and 8 whose homes are one-storey cottages and have a value now, because of pressure on rental space, of maybe €500,000. These are one, two and three-room homes. Those to whom I refer are being asked to pay in some cases twice what somebody living in a Victorian villa 50 miles or 60 miles outside Dublin is asked to pay by way of local property tax. In many cases, they have taken out considerable mortgages on which they are being charged grossly-excessive interest rates by the building societies and the banks whereas the people in the Victorian villa with the loose boxes around the side and the tarmacadam driveway 60 miles from Dublin may not have mortgages at all. The time has come for us to look at the local property tax and to ask if it is fair that people living in those circumstances pay twice what people who are far wealthier and living in objectively far more salubrious circumstances 50 miles or 60 miles from Dublin pay in local property tax.