Barry Ward (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This week we are focusing on some of the huge infrastructure projects the Government is planning, and I welcome the news about them. However, I also look at how they will be implemented and how much regard will be had to the views of local communities in respect of those projects. There appears to be a crisis in our local government, both in terms of the powers of councillors to do the jobs they must do locally and the resources that are available for the local authorities. Given that so many Members of this House are directly connected to councillors around the country, it is appropriate that we have a debate on those issues.

Looking forward, the strategic housing development, SHD, legislation is going to be wound up and, as far as I am concerned, that cannot come soon enough.SHDs are an example of how we as a central Government have bypassed our local authorities and local authority members. For example, I was at a meeting in the last week on the development at Baker's Corner pub near where I grew up. That is undoubtedly a good development but there are aspects of it that will bypass the county council and go directly to An Bord Pleanála, costing every resident who wants to make a submission €20. At the same time, the regulator is saying there needs to be more investment and that fees have not gone up. This already costs people huge amounts of money.

When we talk about Europe we talk about subsidiarity and the principle that we should devolve decision-making as much as possible. We have done the opposite with local government in Ireland. We have centralised and stripped powers away from local government, particularly from local authority elected members. They are the hardest working elected representatives in this country and the worst looked after in their pay and resources. In the last 20 years we have seen a successive stripping away of their powers and it is a crisis of local democracy. If we do not trust them to do their job, how can we expect the populace to have faith in them and invest in that local government? We need to have a debate on this and we need to bring steps forward to restore confidence in our elected local representatives.