Why not downsize the political establishment?

DURING his budget speech, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan mentioned protecting the most vulnerable six times and then proceeded to screw the elderly, sick, disabled and the young.

So what sector of society was he referring to when he referred to the most vulnerable?

It certainly wasn’t the political establishment because there were no proposals to downsize it.

In these difficult financial circumstances, perhaps Fianna Fáil could regain some public trust and confidence by taking a scalpel to the political establishment.

For starters, the 20 ministers of state should be given their redundancy notices.

Most people have no idea who they are and what their jobs are. Indeed some of them don’t know what their jobs are either.

And what about abolishing the Seanad? It is completely invisible and irrelevant to most people. If it were abolished in the morning, would we notice? Would we miss it?

And do we really need 166 TDs? Perhaps 100 would do. About one-third of TDs are inactive in the Dáil. They don’t attend sittings, ask questions, make speeches or propose amendments to legislation if they can get away with it. So why have them?

To those who would argue that 100 legislators couldn’t possibly provide adequate representation, consider that New Zealand has a single-chamber parliament of 120 legislators to represent the same population, but has nearly four times the geographic area. On that basis, 100 legislators sounds generous.

And then there is local government. Is there blubber that could be trimmed from our county and town administrations? Do we need 80 town councils with 740 town councillors?

Swords in Co Dublin, with 34,000 people, is the largest town without a council.

The recent green paper on local government recommended that Swords shouldn’t get one. So if the Government believes a town of 34,000 doesn’t need a town council, then no other town should need one either.

There is wide variation in the numbers of county councillors per population in each county, with Leitrim having one councillor per 1,300 people, whereas Fingal has one councillor per 10,000 people. Fingal wasn’t given any more councillors in the recent local boundary review, so the Government clearly believes one councillor per 10,000 people is adequate representation.

On that basis, 460 surplus county councillors could be cut by only having one councillor per 10,000 people in each county and city council.

If these cutbacks had been made, could enough savings from current expenditure have been found to guarantee medical cards for the over-70s, remove the income levy and spare our schools?

Does Fianna Fáil have the courage and leadership to share the pain of the people by making some painful but necessary sacrifices among the political establishment in these difficult financial times?

To quote Mr Lenihan, “it is no less than a call to patriotic action”. It will be interesting to see if Fianna Fáil is willing to answer this call.

Jason FitzHarris

Rivervalley

Swords

Co Dublin