Barry Ward (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to speak on this topic. As somebody who spent 11 years in local government, many of them with the Acting Chairperson in the Blackrock ward on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, I have a great deal of experience of the workings of local government, both good and bad. There is an important narrative to local government in Ireland, which is that over the past 25 years, successive Governments have sidelined local government.Notwithstanding Article 28A of the Constitution and the importance of local government within our constitutional and legal framework, for the past 25 years and certainly since the Planning and Development Act 2000, councillors – the elected people at local level – have been pushed to the side and relegated from being actual decision-makers at local level to being local ambassadors to the chief executive of the council. I agree that we have great officials and I am very proud of some of the work that was done in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown when I was a member of that council. There are some excellent people in our councils delivering excellent projects such as parks, libraries, cycling infrastructure, housing and all the other things councils do. However, it is being done by officials who will never knock on a citizen’s door and ask them what they think about something. That is not what officials do; it is done by councillors.

Councillors are the ones who go out and take the temperature of the population, talk to people and engage with the people they represent. Yet, their powers have been stripped away time and time again. As I said, they are now essentially people who represent not the views of people rather they represent views to unelected officials, that is, people who do not have to rely on the people’s opinions or satisfaction with what the council does to keep their jobs.

While we and all parties talk about subsidiarity, for example, at European level in particular, Ireland is all about decentralising decision-making, bringing it back to the local level and bringing it back to the national level. We in Ireland actually do the opposite. We centralise decision-making. We take powers away from our local authority members. Those councillors are the hardest working politicians in Ireland, particularly when we consider that they get shag-all resources – excuse me, I should not have said that. They get very little in the way of resources and they get no administrative support. We know how long it took to even change the pay regime for them. It took years and years of trying in order to change it to reflect the actual level of work they do. Quite in contrast with the supports given to Oireachtas Members and MEPs, councillors have none of that. They answer all of their emails themselves, they go to all of their meetings themselves, they take all of their notes themselves and they do all of their representations themselves. It is a huge administrative burden that is not reflected in the amount of money they are paid.

The worst thing about it is that when we do this and sideline local government, we are taking away the real value for money for the taxpayer. We have in Dublin, for example, 183 councillors. One of the things the Local Government Reform Act 2014 did was increase the number of councillors in the Dublin county councils from 28 to 40 and in Dublin City Council up to 63. That is not necessary. I was in Blackrock ward with Senator Boyhan and we went from four to six seats. I do not believe the people of Blackrock are better represented today than they were in 2013. I think they are well represented and we have some high-quality councillors and it reflects not in any way on them, but we did not need more councillors to do the work we did. It diluted the effect of those individual councillors.

The reality is that the taxpayer does not get good value for money when the quality local representatives they have do not have the power to make decisions. The answer you get back on that is that councillors decide the budget. Of course that is true, but is it really true when so much of the budget is decided before it ever gets to councillors? Regarding all of the streams that go through the corporate policy group, CPG, when councillors go tp a CPG meeting, the officials come and have it all planned out. The officials have access to all the information and the councillors do not. Again, this is not a criticism of officials. When a councillor goes into a CPG meeting and says they want to fund X project, the officials will say, “Fine. Show me where you will get the money. What column will you take it out of?” Councillors do not have sufficient information to make those decisions. The reality is that many of the councillors are part time and do not have the time to be delving through pages and pages of council accounts the way officials do. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown had the lowest number of employees per population and had approximately 1,000 people working for the council. That is the infrastructure available to a county manager, chief executive or director of services compared with an individual councillor. It is neither equal nor reasonable. The reality is that it is unfair on the councillors involved but, more important, it is unfair on the people they represent. The people who spend time making a representation and expressing a view to their councillor do not even know that councillor is unlikely to be able to achieve that if it is opposed by an official, and that is not a reasonable circumstance. Unfortunately, successive Governments, with most parties in these Houses, have spent 25 years stripping those powers away from councillors.

The following is an issue I have raised with the Minister of State before. When the Local Government Reform Act came in in 2014, it removed the town councils and replaced them with municipal districts. In Dublin, except for Balbriggan, we did not have town councils, so there are no municipal districts in Dublin. There are also no municipal districts in Galway City Council or Cork City Council. This means that decisions cannot be made by the area committees, which are the de factomunicipal districts. That means the decisions that are made really locally have to go back up the line and be made by the full council. It is a terrible waste of time every month that those decisions cannot be made at a much more local level, practising the principle of subsidiarity.

I have been contacted by councillors this week about policing committees. There is a suggestion now that rather than having councillors on those committees, we would have people who are not elected on them. We either have a democracy at local level or we do not. There is absolutely no point in removing the councillors from that only to exclude them and replace them with people who do not have a mandate and do not have any representative function.

If you want to be a member of a State board and you are a member of a local authority, you are essentially barred from doing that unless there is no pay attached to it. If you are a member of a county council, the Government no longer wants you to play your part. Notwithstanding that there are highly-qualified people around the country who could do it, they are de facto excluded from doing it. It is wrong, it does not make sense, it does not represent good value for Irish people and Irish taxpayers and it sidelines local government in a way that is totally contrary to the policy that we expound at a European level. It is time we changed it.