Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will support Senator Boyhan's amendment and make a couple of general observations. Something that has perhaps been accentuated by the pandemic, but was certainly happening for some time before it, is a change in people's general access to information. At one level, one could argue that the Internet provides extensive access to education, in that from one's living room one can consult any plan one wants to see, look at it in detail and, if provided with the facilities, feed in one's reaction to it without difficulty to whoever is holding the consultation.

That is all very well at one level, but there is another level at which we have to recognise that the use of newspapers, and printed ones in particular, is in decline throughout the country. The younger generation, as I know personally, are inclined not to subscribe to newspapers and do not consider themselves ill informed for not doing so. Some of them subscribe online, while others use news websites and so on. A notion existed at one stage that local government could consult a community by putting an advertisement in a newspaper saying the Mullingar bypass was going to be built and that plans could be found here or there, or alternatively that the Dublin city development plan was available for inspection at a particular place or time. The notion that by placing an advertisement in a newspaper, the responsibility to involve the public would be discharged is wrong.

With the greatest of respect to elected local authority members, although some are more energetic than others, they are not really in a position to bring to the attention of people living in a locality what differences and changes are being proposed in a plan, and to set out the debate in a coherent way. In recent times, I have gone public about the need to consult people on traffic changes in Dublin arising from BusConnects and new bicycle lane layouts, one-way street patterns, restrictions on vehicular traffic and the like. Most people are not aware of these matters unless they are brought to their attention by a leaflet through the door. They do not rummage around any more at the back of The Irish Timesor the Irish Independentfor some notice of a by-law.I cannot generalise, but I believe that most people do not spend their time scouring Dublin City Council websites to see what is happening next. Our national and broadcast news and media do not bring these issues to the attention of people in the way that they used to. Even our political organisations have changed.

I was once Garrett FitzGerald's director of organisation in the Dublin South-East constituency, and I think we had perhaps 14 branches - I have forgotten the exact figure. One of my more pleasant duties in this role was to attend a monthly branch meeting for each branch between eight and ten months of the year. I would group branch meetings together so that, for example, the Sandymount, Ringsend, and Irishtown branches would meet on the same evenings so that I could hop between meetings. In those days of two-channel television, perhaps between 12 and 18 people would attend a branch meeting. They would listen to the minutes and the correspondence, the local authority member would turn up, and there would be a discussion and actual face-to-face feedback between a local authority member, the political organisation and the people in a locality who were of a particular political belief. These meetings were occasions on which issues such as those could be considered.

I am not trying to turn the clock back, and I do not believe that it is possible today to get 12 to 20 people into the back of a pub for such a meeting. Senator Fitzpatrick is probably knows the cumann system within Fianna Fáil better than I do, but certainly on my side of the city, and I would not say it is so much-----