Local democracy exits stage left without a whimper of protest

THERE are groups all over the country busy making preparations for a traditional Irish wake – these are town councillors whose councils will disappear next month under what has been described by Environment Minister Phil Hogan as the most fundamental and radical reform of local Government structures since the 19th century.

The Minister is right, it is radical and it will cause a huge amount of change, particularly at local level. But the jury really is out on whether it will be radical in a way that matters to people at a local level.

The huge surprise here is that this reform has been proposed and introduced with barely a whimper. The relative indifference is all the more stark when compared to the brouhaha there was when the Government attempted to get rid of the Seanad, which many argued then, was an irrelevant institution. At that time we had a full debate and the coming together of high profile individuals in society to argue for and against, with wall to wall media coverage. When the people voted down the Seanad proposal, no one could have said there had not been enough discussion on the topic.

Yet, here we are about to have a whole tier of local democracy wiped out, and 83 directly-elected councils about to disappear, and there has been sod-all debate. No one has complained that this is something that should have been put directly to the people to be decided.

When he launched his reform proposals Minister Hogan pointed out that uniquely, local government is given a franchise by all the residents of Ireland. However unlike the Seanad, local government is not afforded constitutional protection.

What is happening under the Local Government Reform Act 2014 is that the number of local authorities in the country are being reduced by almost 75%. As well as the town councils move, there will be, amongst other things, a series of mergers and amalgamations in Limerick, Waterford and Tipperary. The number of council seats will reduce from 1,627 to 949.

So if you currently live in a town where there is a council and you effectively have a “town hall” that you can go to with a local issue, this will be gone from next month. There will be no more town clerk, or all the staff and other resources that go with that post.

Instead of town councils there will be municipal districts. The councillors elected from a certain area to the county council will be on the municipal district for their home area. These districts will cover every part of the country in a way that the town councils did not and in the future could be developed into something interesting.

But as things stand, they will meet a few times a year, but have no powers to charge rates, and any proposal for a particular local area will have to be brought before the full County Council.

Last Friday, at a conference in UCC “Sovereignty Regained: Has the bailout changed the Irish State? Dr Aodh Quinlivan, a lecturer in politics in the Department of Government there, expressed his surprise at the staggering lack of interest in these upcoming major local government changes. He expressed mirth at the notion that the document produced by the Government to detail all of this, is entitled “Putting People First”.

“I want to be fair,” he said at the conference organised by the Department of Government, “but I simply cannot reconcile slashing our local councils from 114 to 31, creating even greater distance between the citizen and the local council and then calling it Putting People First.” It’s easy to see his point.

It is worth noting that since the founding legislation of 1898 we have moved from over 600 local authorities to 114 and from the end of next month, following the local elections, down to 31. If you compare our 114 local authorities to other European countries you will find that we have far fewer local authorities than the rest – but rather than look at this and wonder at our approach, we have hit for the big time, and decided to take almost three quarters of the councils away.

At present, Quinlivan pointed out, we have a ratio of 35,000 citizens to each of our councils. In France that ratio is 1,600, and in Germany it is 5,400. Next month when we are left with our 31 authorities, we are removing citizens even further from “local” democracy, to a new level of 130,000 to each local authority.

Minister Hogan says that radical measures are needed. His reforms put a strong emphasis on accountability as the bedrock of a properly functioning system of local democracy, and providing for better engagement with citizens. He’s all about increasing efficiency and giving better value for money with the measures which have been proposed.

But is bigger definitely going to be better in this instance? What Minister Hogan has said is that the reform programme will “perhaps” yield significant savings, when fully implemented, of up to €420 million. Reading that sort of official speak you would be naturally inclined to wonder about the accuracy of that figure, and what it might actually turn out to be in reality.

According to Quinlivan there is no evidence for this figure of €420 million.

“I can accept the arguments about efficiencies and economies of scale if they are soundly based on evidence, but not if they are built on nothing. The international evidence refutes the notion that a smaller number of local authorities yields improvements, savings and efficiencies,” he told the UCC conference.

The existing system was definitely broken in many ways — you could have a town with 1500 people with its own town council, and a town of 30,000 with none. Over the years all councillors have had powers removed from them, but they have also shied away from difficult decision such as those to do with traveller accommodation and waste management. These have been handed over to the county manager. The elected representatives often like the status, but not the accountability.

Interestingly, a report from the Council of Europe last year found our Government unwilling to devolve power to local authorities and said 40 years of ministerial promises of local government reform had produced “little result”.

It said the system for allocating the Local Government Fund “remains a mystery to practically everyone in the local government system”, which sounds marvellously Ballymagash.

The system, says the report, remained “excessively centralised” by international standards, and that there is an almost universal recognition that radical changes are needed more than ever. You’d wonder had no one told them of our shiny new blueprint ‘Putting People First’?

Indeed, they were fully aware of it, but felt it “proffers little” in terms of decentralisation, while praising the reforms “in spirit” it did not appear to provide too many concrete steps in that direction. In fact there was concern that some of the actual steps proposed “go in the opposite direction”.

There is no doubt but we needed change to how our local Government operates but this particular reform programme appears to have been undertaken more with financial savings and centralised control in mind, rather than local self government where people felt a sense of ownership and that they were involved in genuine local democracy.