Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State. I thank him for coming to the House and gabhaim comhghairdeas on his appointment as Minister of State with responsibility for local government. He is an excellent choice for the role, having served as a local authority member and knowing the local authority system as intimately as he does. I have great confidence and ambition for the outcome of his local government task force.

If I was to say nothing else to him today, I would tell him to get on with it more than anything. There are 31 independent local authorities in our country. We have had many reports on our local government system, many of them in the recent past. I am very pleased that in the term of the previous Government between 2020 and 2024, we made significant investment in local government. It was in excess of an additional €2 billion and that is not including the housing budgets. It consisted of the urban regeneration and development fund, URDF, the rates waivers and we made progress on the Moorhead report for the councillors. That is all really welcome but if this local democracy task force is to have any meaning, it must be timebound. It must be well informed with strong representation from the elected members of our 31 local authorities. I believe there should be representatives also from both Houses; the Seanad and the Dáil. Many of us have served at local authority level and now have the privilege to work in the Seanad and the Dáil so we can see it from both sides and contribute to strengthening our local democracy.

Most importantly, the task force should not just make recommendations but in parallel and at the same time, include an implementation plan in the report for those recommendations because urgency is needed. It was my great honour and privilege to have first been elected to serve on Dublin City Council in 2004. It is an enormous privilege to represent your local community. It is an incredible honour to be a voice for the people you live with and the people you get the opportunity to serve. That is in stark contrast to the frustrations of being an elected representative because, as other Members have said, you are the front line. You truly are the front line in the housing crisis, if there is a water crisis, in Covid or if there is a storm. Along with those public servants working in each of our 31 local authorities, local authority members are the front line of our democracy so we need to value them and invest in them. I really believe in the points that have been raised already and agree with the issues around the functioning of the local authorities, the value that is being placed on them, the way the powers have been stripped away - the Library and Research Service have very helpful documented it over a time - but any of us involved in local decisions know that anecdotally.More important, the people we represent know it, because they come to their local authority when there are moments of frustration and disappointment in their communities. They are dismayed when they find out it is not a matter for the local authority or councillor and that it may be a matter of the NTA, the TII, the OPR or any number of anonymous State-funded organisations that our citizens are paying their tax to fund to provide a service but are at such a remove from the lived experience of the citizens we represent. The task force on democracy needs to consider a rebalancing of the powers.

As other Members have said, in rebalancing the powers it must also examine the funding of our local authorities. There is major frustration among local authorities in that they can identify the issues and, more important, the opportunities to solve the problems. Dublin City Council identified many housing solutions. Then there is the matter of the tortuous and glacial pace at which the opportunities are progressed because of the back-and-forth, due diligence, cost-benefit analyses and all the processes that are going on at a pace that is not fit for purpose. People are living in the real world and in the here and now and they want local, national and international government to respond at the same pace as they live their lives. They expect that. It is not an unreasonable expectation.

When I think of the back-and-forth that goes on, I note the CEOs of our local authorities are paid a very fine salary and pension, which local authority members are not paid. We give the latter very significant resources to come up with plans, including development plans, budgets, housing plans, recreation plans, integration plans, parks plans and traffic plans – endless plans – and then we second-guess them. We bring them back and forth and back and forth, not over weeks and months but over years. That is not good enough and we need to see this change. We need to see recommendations in the democracy task force that will include implementation plans for making the changes to make our local government more responsive and agile.

I want to talk about local authority members. It was huge privilege for me to have been elected to represent my local community. It is a huge privilege for any member of a local authority to be elected. After the moment of celebration comes the immediate realisation of the enormousness of the task and the paucity of the resources. Our local authority members – it does not matter if they are Independents, members of Sinn Féin or the Green Party-----