Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to support the Order of Business. I refer to No. 1 in respect of the arrangements for Lord John McFall, Lord Speaker and Presiding Officer of the House of Lords, to address the Seanad on 5 October 2022. I am particularly delighted to support that motion. He is a wonderful friend to the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly of which I am a member. He is very supportive and favourably disposed to Ireland and its various circumstances. It will be an interesting visit to the House which I welcome.

On local government funding, today Fine Gael's Senator Carrigy made a really strong case on the shortfall of funding for Longford. I salute him for it. In the local government press clippings that I review every morning, I see we have situations in Roscommon, Galway city and county, Cork and Longford just to name a few. They are the considering the challenges across their local property tax. The local property tax baselines are meant to be under review in the coming months but there is a shortfall, and local authority budgets are coming up. Local authorities are finding they do not have sufficient finances to roll out their services. Overnight, Cork County Council talked about not being in a position to provide core activities in terms of cleaning, cleansing and various essential works in its own area because of a shortfall funding gap of €24 million. That is challenging.

Most of us in this House have been members of local government. We know the challenges around the finances of local government and the pressures that the elected members of our city and county councils come under in balancing their books. They do not want to be cutting services. They want greater efficiencies and it is important that we talk about greater efficiencies when we talk about additional resources for local government finance. Senator Carrigy touched on something very real to Longford. Indeed the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, was here today and is very committed to it. However, it is a bigger issue and we cannot just have special arrangements and special local authorities. We need to address the issue comprehensively. How are we going to have a proper line of sustainable funding for the future of local government? If we are serious about providing greater powers to local government we have to address this issue.

I thank the Cathaoirleach, who has gone, and the Clerk of the Seanad, Martin Groves, and his team for the enormous work they have done to date on Seanad 100. We will later be talking about Northern voices in the Seanad. What an impressive line-up it is. I thank Martin and his team both in the Seanad Office and built around him, as well as the team that have produced the wonderful booklet we will see later and the impressive line-up of activities for Seanad 100. We are going to have a great celebration that is appropriate and measured and that relates to our core activity and our pioneering legislative work in Seanad Éireann. It is going to be a great period from now until the end of the year. I thank the people we never really see other than around a table at a meeting, who are really going to make this a great success.