'Imbalance of power' not addressed by reform plan

“I don’t think there’s been any legislative change since the foundation of the state that has seen an improvement in local government. We’ve taken away powers and we’ve centralised powers; we’ve created agencies which should more rightly be the responsibility of local government.”

Proposed reforms to how local government in Ireland operates do not address substantive imbalances in power between local authorities and national government, according to Cork City councillor Dan Boyle (Green Party).

Municipal councils, one of the more substantial proposals in the final report of the Local Democracy Taskforce, would not resolve the basic issue that Ireland is lacking in various levels of local government, said Boyle.

“I think it was a big mistake to get rid of town councils. I don’t think that calling Municipal Districts ‘councils’ will be anything like a replacement.

“All other systems of local government throughout Europe have a multi-tiered approach to local government. In fact, we’re lacking in two levels - we don’t have a town level of local government which the town councils used to do, and we don’t have a regional government.

“We have regional assemblies, I’m a member of one myself, the Southern Regional Assembly, but we don’t have revenue raising or decision making powers, which in other countries for example would have budgetary responsibility for health and education,” he said.

One issue that the report does not address is salaries. Cork city councillors are currently paid €32,059.00 gross per annum, which is taxable. They also receive a monthly allowance of €3,162.36 per annum.

However, Cllr Kieran McCarthy (Indep) said that this salary is not commensurate with the volume of work expected of councillors, many of whom are required to hold down a second job.

“There’s nothing there in terms of promoting people to go into public service as a local councillor, it doesn’t tackle the salary issue, it doesn’t deal with maternity or paternity leave. I just found it a very vague report overall,” he said.

He said what was positive was the recommendation to establish a forum for direct discussion between councillors and government ministers. However, he said that ministers should be required to appear before councils.

“They should have to go before councils regularly. In my 17 years I’ve never really seen ministers come before the council.

“I think the Minister for Local Government should be on a conveyor belt going around to different councils. I know there’s 31 of us, but they should aim in any one season to get to four or five councils."

However, Cllr Boyle said that while the forum is welcome, it will achieve very little if the “imbalance of power” in the relationship between local authorities and councillors remains unchanged.

Both councillors also highlighted the proposed boundary review recommended in the report as being positive.

Cllr Boyle said that he would ideally like to see an extra councillor added to each ward of Cork city, which he said would address the proportional imbalance in the amount of people represented per councillor.

Cork City Council has one councillor for just over 7,000 people, while for contrast, Leitrim County Council has one councillor for every 1,955 people.

This article was produced with the support of the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme funded by Coimisiún na Meán.