Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail)

-----all put themselves forward for election out of a desire to serve their communities. I do not believe they go forward for any other reason but that. The State needs to support them. Senator Joe Conway described one of our councillors who is suffering with an illness and he said they did nothing wrong. Not only did they not do anything wrong but they did something incredibly generous and great. They gave up their time, talent, energy and life to put themselves forward to serve their local community. At a minimum, when councillors need some help, they should be supported. That is the basic minimum they should be provided with. That they do not get a pension but instead get a gratuity, that the payment of that gratuity is delayed and that it is held in escrow, not gaining anything for them or anybody else for that matter, is inefficient and incompetent and needs to be rectified. Councillors need to be supported with professional services. They need help obtaining independent legal advice and secretarial support, and they need to be equipped to do the job the State is asking them to do. All of them are willing and able and all of them, given the right support, will make an even greater contribution than they are already making.

The Minister of State has our full support. The Fianna Fáil group is delighted to be in a position to be able to contribute. We look forward to working with him and his officials to make the task force successful. As I said earlier, however, we want to see representation from the councillors. AILG and LAMA are the representative bodies and have contributed. I am aware the Minister of State has met their officials but we want to see councillors adequately represented on the task force. We want to see Members from both Houses on the task force and we want to see it time bound. We want to see an implementation plan with the recommendations.