Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is welcome. I am very supportive of deliberative democracy. As the Minister of State rightly said, it is not an experiment any more. It has become a vital cog in the wheel of democracy. He is right that we will be running assemblies concurrently. That is new, as is going beyond the electoral register. I hope both those innovations add value to the process.

Obviously, I support a citizens' assembly on biodiversity loss and one on the type of directly elected mayor and local government structures best suited to Dublin. I am also very supportive of citizens' assemblies on drugs and the reform of education. I hope those will be prioritised. All Members know reform of the leaving certificate is needed. People are calling for that to happen now. There has been a similar urgency for a very long time in respect of drugs. Other Senators will speak on that more passionately than I will.

I am here because of the 183 local councillors. The Minister of State was a councillor on the same council as me. I refer to the pattern in terms of the loss of powers of local councillors in the past decade. We are discussing bringing in a directly elected mayor. That is a positive but obviously there are chief executives and the aim is to balance where we are now. We also need to address the balance for the local councillors in Dublin who are not part of municipal districts and have to go to the county council as area committees. I was one of those councillors. We need good people on councils and we need them to feel they are adding value to their areas.

The Minister of State is from Castleknock, an area I represented. There are community groups in areas such as Castleknock that want to be able to have more influence on their development plans. There are urban planning frameworks and there are hopes in the context of development plans for more influence through things such as the same kind of set-up there is with the Town Centre First approach, but that needs to be reflected in the council structures. We need councillors to have more powers. We need local communities to be able to rely on their councillors to deliver what they want. We have seen how communities have flourished during Covid. People want to be able to continue to build identities, identify with their areas and have that influence. I am here for those 183 councillors. I want to ensure we are getting the balance right not just for the chief executive and the mayor, but also for them.