Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I again welcome the Minister to the House. While I did not think it would happen this way, I am particularly pleased that these two amendments are being taken right at the beginning of the debate. For many years I was a councillor on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. I know the Minister used to be a councillor, as have many Members of this House. I took a lot of trouble to look at the record of the House and I am very happy to share all this with the Minister. I want to be positive, as he is.

At the outset, I say that I genuinely support the bulk of the Bill. I have a strong record in supporting it. I have always said I do not have any hang-up about the public sector working with the private sector. Senator Cummins has emphasised that in his contributions. I am a former Progressive Democrat counsellor who advocated for the private sector and I have never apologised for that. I believe it is using all our resources and all our tools to get houses built. This is one very important aspect of it.

I think many things are coming right for the Minister. I am sure he is looking forward to his summer holidays, as we are, because he is clearly getting a considerable amount of legislation tidied up and hopefully finished. I genuinely wish the Minister the best of luck with his housing for all policy next week. As a member of the committee, I will continue to actively engage with the Minister on its objectives and aspirations.

The Minister might note that I did not pursue any of the other amendments because I wanted to keep the focus on this one. If there was ever one single issue of importance, it is this issue. I said previously that the Association of Irish Local Government, AILG, drafted these amendments. I share that body's concerns on these issues and it shared these documents. Members of the AILG along with the Local Authority Members Association appeared before the committee. They strongly voiced their concern over the disposal.

We know what a section 183 disposal is. For those who are not in the Chamber and would not be familiar with it, I will take two or three minutes of my time to explain. There are reserved functions and there are executive functions in local government. The executive functions are clearly for the executive and the reserve functions are for the elected members. Section 183 of the Local Government Act 2001, as amended, provides for a disposal notice. It empowers the local authority members to have a veto, for want of a better word, over the disposal of leases that are over 12 months or freehold or disposal of properties. They could be sites, derelict lands or properties. It covers a range of issues. The system has served the country and local authorities well.

The manager, now the chief executive, is required to present a report to the elected members. In that he is required to provide a map. He is required to give a history of the thing. He is required to set out if there are any encumbrances or difficulties relating to the disposal or any conditions prior to that. To the best of his knowledge he must set out the history of how the property came into the hands of the local authority and the reason for now proposing its disposal. Those reports are sent to the elected members. They consider them and take their own soundings. Invariably councillors have considerable knowledge because they are on the ground and live in these communities.

One of the great things about section 183 is conditionality. Next week Sligo County Council will consider a section 183 proposal. Quite a few of them are being considered by other local authorities. I took on the task of looking at the ones this year and last year. I took a particular interest in Fingal County Council and Dublin generally because these are big places where the bigger issues are. I also looked at Limerick and Dún Laoghaire. It is interesting to see the trend in the political people and parties involved who rightly opposed them. That is their prerogative and is provided for in the legislation. Invariably they do not oppose them but try to apply conditions.

One of the provisions relating to a section 183 disposal, as the Minister knows, is that elected members may apply conditions to the sale.Without going into the matter, the Oscar Traynor site exercised the Minister and many other people. Today, however, I looked at a debate in March in Dublin City Hall and noted the correspondence and the engagement surrounding the debate. I printed it all off. Fine Gael had a very strong, concise view, and most of that was channelled and discussed through James Geoghegan, who is one of the party's councillors there. Fine Gael was very clear and there was no ambiguity as to where it stood on this. Fianna Fáil discussed the proposed land development agency, LDA, and expressed serious concerns about it per se, and that is absolutely right. RTÉ covered this. Cieran Perry, an excellent Independent councillor on Dublin City Council, said in Dublin City Hall that the Government may regard councillors as an inconvenience but that they are the democratically elected representatives of our communities. Further, the Labour Party councillor of long experience, Dermot Lacey, said the LDA Bill amounted to a land grab and a power grab that repeated a 20-year pattern of weakening of local government. Those are just some of the things that were said.

Fianna Fáil expressed serious concerns about the Bill. There were eight different motions that night. They were debated at the meeting, with Sinn Féin and People Before Profit opposing the Bill in its entirety while the Green Party, the Labour Party, the Social Democrats and the Independents criticised the loss of councillors' control over the disposal of local authority lands. Fianna Fáil expressed concern about councillors' loss of power. That is what was said at Dublin City Council. I say this just to give the Minister a flavour of the debate and the concerns and because the AILG and the Local Authority Members Association, LAMA, are made up of members of his party, Fianna Fáil. They are committed and have expressed a view, and those are their representative bodies. The Minister is entitled to his view; I respect that absolutely. This is not personal but political. These organisations' memberships are made up of Fine Gael and all other parties, Independents, non-party councillors - everybody - and I wish to put on the record my enormous thanks to the president of the AILG, Mary Hoade, a member of Fianna Fáil, who has done a lot of work on this, and Anne Colgan, who prepared these papers for the members.

Where does that leave us? I take this opportunity to thank also our committee, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage, for its work and engagement with these representative bodies. We heard loud and clear what the elected members wanted and what these associations wanted. I tabled 12 amendments, all in the name of the AILG, because it had done the work on them and presented them to me. We moved four of them the other night. The Minister came in and said he would not take any amendments, as is his right. That is grand. We can only put our best foot forward. This is democracy and we are a bicameral Parliament. It should be remembered that we are here not just to agree. As the Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, said when he addressed the House a year or two ago, we would expect in a bicameral Parliament that the Seanad would polish up and perhaps make amendments to legislation. Indeed, the Dáil took on board a number of Seanad amendments to the climate action Bill late last night. That was important and represents a good and healthy relationship between the two Chambers, which are distinctly separate yet inter-reliant in many ways. I also thank the Library and Research Service because it did a very extensive Bill digest on the legislation.

Where am I going with this? It is right we should empower councillors. I do not doubt the Minister's commitment in that regard. I spoke to a number of Fine Gael people who asked me to take a look at the original Bill, which I did, and in the Bill there was no question of section 183 being watered down at all. The Minister clearly took on board some issues and added the piece, which I acknowledge, whereby only zoned land would be deemed suitable. I would go so far as to say the LDA in the future should have a bigger remit beyond residential. It could be tied in with its relationship with Enterprise Ireland in this area, but that is another day's work. I think there is future scope, but that is for another day.

We have heard a lot of talk about empowering and supporting local government, about mayors and about the plebiscite that took in place in Limerick in which they decided they would have a mayor. Now it would appear even the mayor would have no veto. The Minister has a good track record in how he has worked in local government but he has clearly had his battles in Fingal, and rightly so. He represented the people out there. Why are we going to empower unelected chief executives with this function? Why are we taking this function away from the elected members? I have had my own advice on this that tells me it is proposed the Government will take away this reserved function from the elected members in certain circumstances. I do not know why. What happened between the Minister, the change in government and the new Government with the earlier Bill, which contained no mention of taking away section 183? Suddenly I am told the County and City Management Association, CCMA, thought it was a great idea. Of course they think it is a great idea, but they are not elected. Fianna Fáil's councillors in the city and the county are elected and we are all equal here. We all have a mandate to represent people. I simply will not apologise. I work hard, as everyone else in this Chamber does. I engage with city and county councillors because I like to do so. It is my full-time job, and I will always defend the rights of our democratically elected city and county councillors. I am not in the business of eroding any of their powers. I want to see them have more powers. I want to see us devolve more powers. I want to stop seeing these great announcements every day of the week in which the Government says it will throw money at this and throw money at that and about how it is funding projects around the country. Let the local authorities make those announcements and those decisions.

The Minister will be aware of section 28A.1 of the Irish Constitution, which states:

The State recognises the role of local government in providing a forum for the democratic representation of local communities, in exercising and performing at local level powers and functions conferred by law and in promoting by its initiatives the interests of such communities.

It is important we support these people. They represent us. We talk about better local government. We need to revisit that and support measures for better local government. We talk about more powers for councillors, yet this initiative will take them away, despite what the Minister might say. We talk about having mayors directly elected by the people and the communities, yet mayors will not be able to engage on this. We talk in this legislation, which I want to stay focused on, about how we are taking away those functions from the elected members. It is just not right or proper. I would be failing in my duty and, more importantly, in my commitment to the people who elected me to this House, the city and county councillors and Deputies and Senators in this House, if I did not say this. I have enjoyed cross-party support. I have always tried to work with people because that is important.

I am not convinced the Minister has done the right thing here. I understand the timelines and understand that the Dáil is going into recess, but I had flagged this and many other people had flagged concerns about this legislation for a long time. The Minister's party members, some of whom did not get elected to the Dáil and some of whom came from councils, went door to door to speak to our city and county councillors, as did I. They made commitments. They know the commitments they made. I am not necessarily aware of them but I know what commitments I made. I committed that I would fight for the rights of local government and fight for city and county councillors because I thought it was important. I sought to be a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government during the term of the previous Seanad and was happy to be put on it through these Houses and through the processes of the Houses. I sought for the second time to be on the committee because I wanted to be on it and because I believe in local government, I believe in local democracy, I believe in our city and county councillors, I believe they need to be supported and I believe in better actions, subsidiarity and making decisions for our people on our homes, our communities, security, enterprise and all the issues that feed into what community is.

I make this case to the Minister today because I have taken the fight to the front line. I have done my best; I can do no more.It rests with the Members of this House. Will they stand shoulder to shoulder with city and county councillors and leave them exclusively with the reserve function and power they have today? That is all I ask for.