Department to review local government reforms of 2014

The Department of the Environment and Local Government is to carry out a review of its 2014 reform of local government.

The restructuring of local government brought about the abolishing of town councils and a subsequent reduction in the number of local authorities from 114 to 31. With some county councils also amalgamated and refined, the reforms led to a cut of 678 councillors.

Most significantly, at local authority level, power was handed over to municipal district bodies.

With 80 town councils dissolved, the municipal district bodies are governing larger areas and reporting in turn, in some cases, to more swollen county councils.

The department says the review being carried out is merely procedural — a timely exercise, it says, after two years of change. However, already, there are signs the structures are creaking and unwieldy.

Particularly bemoaned are the loss of town councils which saw the exit of the centrally-located town halls, town clerk, offices and local councilors.

Instead of movement radiating from a centre, the power has been dispersed.

Filling the vacuum in many towns, with support from county councils’ executive staff, are chambers of commerce and tourism.

However, a former town councillor, now Independent Alliance councillor Michael Gleeson said such bodies have no statutory powers. They cannot make laws, he said, they cannot decide on a rate and are not elected by the people. He said the loss to some towns, such as tourist hotspot Killarney, was already apparent.

“Killarney Town Council had worked hard, with positive support from the county council, to bring the town and surrounding area up to an appropriate standard.

“The area was transformed over the past 20 or so years, culminating in its overall victory in the national Tidy Towns competition in 2012.”

Now, inappropriate signage was beginning to appear much more frequently and the same attention was not being paid to the town by Kerry County Council.

Such actions, he said, not only confined to Killarney, were inevitable because of the transfer of financial authority away from towns.

“Over many years, I had made the point every area needed a strong and vibrant centre. It is from that centre that standards and prosperity radiate to the peripheral areas. Without a strong centre there cannot be real progress in an area,” Mr Gleeson said.

“Therein lies part of the problem arising from the dissolution of the town council and the centralising of funds to county halls. There is now a little for every place but maybe not enough for what should be the vibrant epicentres.”

Throughout the country, large numbers of town councillors resisted the abolition and had warned of the dangers of losing local power and local mayors.

Mr Gleeson said it was pathetic to now hear Labour politicians bemoan the abolition of councils when their party had presided over it. He said more and more chambers of commerce and their chairpersons are being asked to step forward to fill the vacuum.

Kerry council’s chief executive Moira Murrell outlined how County Hall was actively supporting chamber alliances in Tralee and Killarney, along with other towns, as “good models to engage with local authorities”.

Mr Gleeson said while business organisations had their place and their role, they did not have executive authority and could not, in law, have a function to raise finance.

Meanwhile, there are other concerns that have become apparent to observers at council meetings. The larger so-called plenary bodies or councils appear unwieldy with little debate and a lot of duplication with massive agendas processed at breakneck pace.

In Kerry, alone, €250,000 was spent in revamping the council chamber to accommodate six extra members.

In recent weeks, there have been calls for ‘salary’ increases for councillors in the light of the reforms. Fine Gael senator Tom Sheahan said he had already raised the issue of the increased workload that county councillors faced since the abolition of municipal, town and borough councils.

While, in Cork, Seanad candidate Bob Ryan, a county councillor, said he would press for councillors to have secretary facilities.

Mr Sheahan wants a survey of all councillors, in conjunction with their representative bodies, to ascertain how these changes have affected their personal, professional and public lives.

The department, in the meantime, said the “operational review” was simply to examine how the new regime was operating in the last two years. The review has no timescale and the department said it was not yet in a position to give feedback. The review, it is believed, will also examine the issue of directly elected city and county mayors.