‘Efficiency’ drive isn’t about helping local government, it’s about cuts

YOU should have seen Carrick-on-Shannon at the weekend.

There was an international summer school, in honour of the great John McGahern, that brought many of us on a voyage of discovery through the places he loved and through some of the finest writing of the last 50 years.

The summer school alone attracted several hundred visitors to the town.

But there was much more. The streets were colourful and lively, the pubs thronged and welcoming, and the harbour was chock-a-block with boats from the Shannon. Children everywhere were being entertained by face-painters and clowns on stilts, and food stalls on the roadside were doing a lively trade.

Athlone, the following day, was the same. Again there was a festival, with flags and stalls from all the countries of Europe. But above all there were people, young and old, walking the streets, enjoying the sights of a lively Irish town. The whole place had a real buzz – you couldn’t drive through it without wanting to stop and savour the atmosphere.

I drive a lot around Ireland in the course of my work. And everywhere I go I’ve noticed the same thing. Take Durrow, for example – a little village known for years as one of the last bottle-necks on the road between Dublin and Cork. You’d think when Durrow was finally bypassed by the motorway that would inevitably mean its slow death. But not a bit of it. To visit Durrow now is to visit a village that seems to have rediscovered its soul. The houses look brighter, there are flowers everywhere, and the streets have the look of a busy, thriving community.

Yes, there’s a recession. But driving around Ireland gives you the strong impression that people aren’t lying down under it. They’re getting on with life, investing in their own communities – maybe rediscovering the importance of their own place – and generally giving the impression of a people who have by no means given up hope. Maybe it’s superficial. Maybe it’s the weather (we even had the odd glimmer of sunshine last weekend). But I think there’s something more going on, some sense of community spirit that has the capacity to rebuild.

It’s interesting to try to figure out what’s behind this. Perhaps there are some philanthropic businessmen out there, ploughing bits of money into the towns and villages they come from. Perhaps it’s enterprising shop-keepers and publicans, desperate to keep business alive. Perhaps it’s community groups and activists who believe in working hard for their own place. Perhaps it’s all of those things – and almost certainly it is. But the rekindling of spirit requires a sense of vision and leadership, and it needs a decent sort of local democratic infrastructure as well. In fact if you delve into the efforts that are being made all around Ireland to bring towns back to life and to prevent the collapse of community spirit under the weight of economic neglect, you’ll see the hand of local government.

At the heart of all these efforts there will be a leader. He or she might be a councillor, or a town clerk, or a county manager. But very little of it would be happening without the leadership that good local government can bring to bear.

And we have good local government in Ireland. It’s the sort of think people love to complain about, but when you think about it, the contribution that local government has made to the quality of life in Ireland down through the years has been immense. Of course it could be improved in all sorts of ways, and of course local government in some parts of the country has seen its share of inefficiencies and even scandals. But in little ways and large – from the library service to the maintenance cemeteries, from the quality of our drinking water (mostly) to the lighting of our streets – local government in Ireland has never been found wanting.

It was, I suppose, that desire to make local government even better and more responsive that prompted the publication just a couple of years ago of a government green paper on the subject.

A green paper is a way sometimes used by government to encourage debate and to put up options for change. This paper was considered necessary because, as it said itself, in a rapidly changing world “local government is tasked with serving a larger, more diverse, more educated and more demanding population. In addition to providing traditional ‘hard’ services, such as housing, roads and water etc, local authorities must now give more time to the more complex ‘softer’ tasks of community building”.

That’s why the green paper went on to argue that “The central theme of Stronger Local Government – Options for Change is that local government can deliver more if equipped to do so. It suggests that the sector can be strengthened by providing a greater role for local, democratic and responsible leadership. This poses a challenge to a number of interests, including central government. It also provides an opportunity to create a more dynamic and lessdependent local government system.”

Well, bye-bye green paper. The same minister who published it last week brought out another report, this time called the Report of the Local Government Efficiency Review Group. Apparently, it’s not stronger local government we want after all, it’s cheaper local government. And it’s not more local democracy we’re after, it’s more centralisation.

THE same people who brought us the HSE, apparently in the belief that centralising everything makes it more efficient, now want fewer local authorities, fewer people working and leading on the ground, and fewer services delivered in response to local need. And the same people who see healthcare as a vehicle for introducing more and more charges want to use local government as a way of raising more and more taxes.

Those new taxes include tolls on already deteriorating and long-built national primary roads, and a tax on being elderly and less computer literate. People who want to comply with the law of the land by keeping their motor tax up to date are going to be charged more if they don’t do it over the internet. Did you ever hear of anything so patronising and insulting?

In carefully coded language, the efficiency report makes it quite clear that its recommendations are simply not compatible with the earlier proposals for strengthening local government. But the bottom line for the efficiency group is set out in one stark sentence on page 12: “The origins of this examination of local government are in the severe financial crisis facing the State and the need for all levels of government to contribute to national recovery.”

It’s not about service, it’s about money. It’s not about improving local government, it’s about cutting it. It’s not about putting a sound financial basis under our system of local government, it’s about getting us all to pay more for less.

And it’s all being done in the name of efficiency – surely one of the most debased words in the language of Irish politics. If efficiency means fewer services and less local democracy in return for higher charges, then words have surely ceased to have any meaning at all.