Local government - Unknown fate for council staff

Deciding to shut down town councils and centralise local government within county council structures is one thing, but implementing the decision is a very different matter. What is going to happen to the buildings now housing the local council offices, and what is going to happen to the people working in them?

Cork county manager Martin Riordan has warned that a huge amount of work needs to be done before Cork County Council will be able to subsume the functions of the town councils when those councils are abolished next year. This will inevitably be a problem throughout the country. It is most unlikely that all town council offices will be maintained, which raises the issue of what is to be done with those offices and buildings that will no longer be needed.

Many urban council workers are worried about their jobs. Will they all be transferred to positions within the country structure, or will some be considered surplus to requirements?

The Lee Valley Enterprise Board and Macroom Town Council are holding a public meeting next week to discuss the fallout from the abolition of the town council. They will consider the likely impact on rates, social housing and planning.

The rates in some well-run towns are lower than others, but these will have to be equalised on a countywide basis. This will effectively punish those who kept their rates down and reward those that were less efficient. Of course, such issues need to be considered, but surely those things have been carefully considered before the decision was made to abolish the town councils. Our track record on government restructuring certainly does not inspire confidence.

For most of the past half century the emphasis of government restructuring has been on decentralisation. In 1964 then finance minister James Ryan stated that the government headed by Seán Lemass planned to transfer a number of departments from Dublin to provincial areas.

The first moves were announced three years later by the government of Jack Lynch. The Department of Education was moved to Athlone and the Department of Lands to Castlebar. In 1999 then finance minister Charlie McCreevy promised the most extensive decentralisation, with over 10,000 civil service jobs being moved from Dublin, but the minister stressed that there would be “no redundancies”.

Eight government departments were to be moved to eight centres. Over 130 towns applied to be considered for one of the departments or agencies being transferred. The moves were announced in the budget of 2003. “The whole thing sounds attractive,” the Irish Examiner warned in a leader at the time, “but it has aspects of a political confidence trick.”

This was the height of decentralisation. The following year the Government announced that the various health boards spread around the country were being scrapped and replaced by the Health Service Executive. This amounted to a U-turn, back towards centralisation. The HSE has been a disaster that has not only driven the country towards bankruptcy but has also prompted the most serious questioning of our health services.

Last week there was the story of a man who collapsed less than a five minutes’ drive from Our Lady’s Hospital in Navan, but it took the ambulance half an hour to get to the scene, and the unfortunate man subsequently died. This kind of centralisation certainly does not inspire confidence.