Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for being here. I was attending a meeting of the finance committee as he delivered his speech but I read it subsequently. I look forward to his defence of his former constituency colleague, the former Minister, Mr. Phil Hogan. I have no doubt he is ably positioned to do it. I have a few comments to make in the limited time I have.

The Moorhead report is not directly related to local government funding but it is essential that we get to see this report. Its publication has been repeatedly delayed. As somebody who was delighted to spend 12.5 years on a local authority, I know councillors are doing full-time jobs for what is effectively less than minimum wage. They are putting in hours of work and not just at committee meetings, including strategic policy committees, area committees, municipal district meetings, health forums and regional assemblies etc. They also make enormous amounts of representations and get involved with personal cases. They deal with political parties, resident associations, traders and Tidy Towns committees. If one adds together all the hours that people put in and what they get for it, I have no doubt they would be in breach of the working time directive and would be on half or even less than half of the minimum wage per hour. Will the Minister of State deal with that in his response?

We are dealing with local government funding. I do not have a go at people in here but if a council maintains a reduction of 15% time and again and year in and year out before deciding to not apply the same reduction in a following year, it is an increase from 85% of whatever it was to 100%. That is an increase of more than 15% of the charge that people would have paid in previous years. People would notice that when the bill arrives. The deduction would be taken from a bank account or salary and it would be more than a 15% increase. To most people, including Senator Humphreys, that is an increase.

When the local property tax was initially applied, the line was that it was funding local services. It was then a household charge. It funded local services all over the country and not just in the region it was collected. There are 12 local authorities paying into the equalisation fund, with 19 authorities taking money out. Some local authorities in Dublin are putting more into the equalisation fund than other counties are raising. A charge of €1,000 in Dún Laoghaire, which would not be uncommon, reduced by €150 to €850, would see €600 of the total replacing grants that used to be there from the central government that were killed off by the Fine Gael-Labour Party Government. There is €200 going to the equalisation fund. This means Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council is only €50 per household better off despite taking €850 from a household. People thought when they paid very significant levels of property tax that they would get something for it.People thought they would see an improvement in services, libraries, swimming pools, footpaths, tree cutting and everything else but that did not happen. It could not happen because central Government deprived local authorities of huge amounts of money that it used to give to them. It was a con job. There is no point in pretending it was not. That is the reality and they are the figures published by the head of finance in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. It applies to all the Dublin region and probably to the 12 local authorities paying into the equalisation fund. We must have a reasonable debate on it.

The money that was being paid to compensate Irish Water is not there now. I do not like using the words "con job", but it is certainly very disingenuous to say funding has not been affected, and for Government to say the funding of local government has not been affected if it is taking money from them. For Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown - the local authority I am most familiar with, even though I am familiar with all 31 local authorities - to be handed Dún Laoghaire Harbour with liabilities and ongoing maintenance of €33 million with nothing to compensate for it is another transfer of cost from central Government to local government.

I thank the Minister for being here and the Acting Chairman for being somewhat lenient on time, which we are sharing. It is important to publish the Moorhead report and to remunerate our councillors for what they do in a decent and respectful way. Let us get on with treating local government with the respect it deserves.