The purpose of this Bill is to remove from local authority members the rather odious requirement of having to appoint individuals to the position of rate collectors to their local authority. I doubt if the removal of this task will be regretted by many members of local authorities. From time to time local authority members have complained about this obligation but they have never refused to carry it out. When people stand for election to a local authority they do so knowing that there may be obligations placed on them which they will not like. They will accept these obligations if they wish to achieve some of the measures which first prompted them to stand for election. Therefore, they will not be upset at losing this dubious privilege of being allowed to appoint rate collectors to their local authority area. However, they will be upset in certain areas of the country about the proposed method of appointment. One procedure which is calculated to arouse the suspicion of every local authority member is the behind-closed-doors activities of the officials.
We should look at the anomalous position of the rate collector in the local authority service. He is the only official who operates in the local authority—and perhaps in the public service—on a bonus system. Public servants generally know how much they are paid weekly and that it will be increased only through national wage rounds or negotiated increases. Officials are appointed on a salary basis with annual increments and occasional national or negotiated salary increases.
The rate collector, however, occupies the strange position whereby he is paid a flat rate of salary to carry out a duty, and he is also paid, at certain times during the financial year, a bonus depending on whether he has achieved a certain percentage return of his total warrant for that financial year. I imagine what makes the position attractive and lucrative to rate collectors is the aim that they should try to earn together with their salary all of their bonuses in any one financial year.
I do not know why the appointment of rate collectors was left separate from the other two systems which the Parliamentary Secretary outlined— appointment by a managerial order or by the Local Appointment Commissioners—or why rate collectors alone occupied this unique position. It could have been because one of the few real powers left to elected members of local authorities is that they should adopt the estimates and strike the rate for their local authority for the coming year. The thinking may have been that, having given them that power, they should also be allowed to appoint the officers who would be directly responsible for the collection of the warrant to finance that adopted rate. Whatever the reason, the rate collector's position stands unique within the local authority service and rather strangely within the public services as we know them in this island.
Because of the unusual duties and strange methods of collection which a rate collector is obliged to carry out, the qualities required for this position—it is the last job that I personally would consider—should include a local knowledge and the collector and his family should be known locally in the area. His integrity and personal standing in the community should be known and respected. He should have the qualities of understanding and compassion so that he can appreciate the very real difficulties confronting those from whom he is expected to collect money at certain times during the year. Not only from the point of view of achieving his bonuses but also of keeping the local authority solvent, he should have the quality of endurance.
The question has been asked why we need rate collectors, why the method of collection of rates for any local authority cannot be carried out through an office in the same way as other public services. I do not propose either to defend or to criticise the system. I should just like to make the point that, next to paying tax, probably the most objectionable thing for any member of the community to be asked to pay rates. I do not think it is just as simple as sending an ESB or telephone bill to a client and asking him to pay up, because he knows very well that if he does not pay the electricity bill or telephone bill in due course the services will be disconnected and he will no longer be able to avail of them.
I do not think anybody, certainly not the officials of the Custom House, has yet devised a system whereby one can be deprived of the use of public lighting and the public highway and footpaths and various other services which our local authorities provide. If there is merit in having a personalised collector service it is (a), that it is personalised and (b), that because of the bonus incentive, the collector realises that it is personally lucrative and worth his while to follow up his warrant and to endeavour to achieve as high a percentage collection rate as possible.
Perhaps if the system of financing local authorities were to be changed and based on some form of local income tax it might well then be levied by means of an office collection, but until such time as the long promised and now much disbelieved white paper on local finance is published I presume it would be wrong of us to go into that aspect of the service in any great depth, although I understand the white paper which is to be published will say absolutely nothing new about anything in relation to the financing of local authorities. However, I hope I will be proved wrong in that prediction although I would be prepared to lay a small wager that I will not.
The system which is being proposed to replace the present method of appointment is that each county manager should be allowed to appoint his own rate collectors. It has been suggested in the Parliamentary Secretary's speech this evening and in another place that what in effect will take place is that an interview board will be set up composed of some outside members and one or perhaps more local officials of the local authority, who will interview applicants and grade them on a laid-down scale of educational standards and ability and integrity and various other things.
The great difficulty with promises such as this is that they are merely promises. As has been pointed out at other times in this House, nothing that is not contained within an Act is enforceable no matter what promise may be given by a Minister or Parliamentary Secretary here or elsewhere. This will count for nothing unless it is written into an Act and is therefore part of the law of the land, in this case part of the local government code, and consequently leaves an obligation on the country manager or whoever else may be obliged to perform the function to carry it out in accordance with that Act.
What we are instead presented with is a very short two-section Bill which merely changes the reserve function of appointing rate collectors from the members and hands it over as an executive function to the county manager. We have been promised regulations which will dictate to the manager the method he should use to set up his appointment board, the type of people who should be on it and the sort of conditions which the board would be obliged to seek from applicants. It is my honest belief that it is unfair to this or any other House to present a Bill such as this in the form it has been presented without providing that very necessary ancillary information as to how exactly this new method of appointment is to work.
It seems to me there has been far too much loose and glib talk on the part of public representatives, perhaps often acting more in their role of politicians, members of the press—I hesitate to add the same rider to that description as I added to the first one, although I am tempted—and other people criticising the public method of appointment. I am a member of a local authority. I have voted and taken part in the appointment of rate collectors under the present system. I do not like it but I accept that it is currently, until this Bill is passed, my responsibility to do it and I am prepared, as many other members of this House have been prepared, to face up to that responsibility. I honestly and genuinely believe that the vast majority of members of local authorities down through the years have faced up to that responsibility and have undertaken that task, however much they disliked it, to the best of their ability.
It is of course fair to say that the majority of appointments made under that system were made on a political basis. It is probably fair to say that when the appointment method was first set up under the 1940 Act it was intended to be a political appointment. It was known at that time that it was to be a political appointment. There were no great objections or there was no enormous public outcry about it despite the fact that the majority of us now might feel that it is distasteful and personally dislike it. But it was a system of open public vote. If a man was appointed and if his political affiliations were taken into consideration, as undoubtedly they were by every party that is currently represented in this House, but that may have been in the past and may well be in the future. All of these parties have participated in that system, so let none of them criticise it or play sham or hypocrisy or stand up now or again in any other place to say, "Hand me my finger bowl and let me wash my hands of the affair", because it is just not true.
All political parties participated in it, and the general public to a large extent, understood the machinations of the system. No one particularly liked it. Mostly the people who had to carry out the voting at the end did not like it but they did it. Perhaps they often did it because they knew darn well that if they did not go in and cast their vote in relation to a particular appointment the other political parties who were members of the local authority would cast their votes very quickly and take the appointment for their own appointee.
But the one saving grace, and the thing that deserves to be said and should and must be said in praise of those local authority members down through the years, irrespective of which party they were from, is that in the vast majority of cases their appointees proved to be efficient, loyal and, above all else, honest and dedicated servants of the local authority to which they were appointed. The number of cases of rate collectors defaulting with portions of their warrant is infinitesimally small.
It is worth repeating here what has been said in other places. The local authority of which I am a member, Dublin County Council, down through the years appointed hundreds of rate collectors and fewer of them than the number of fingers on one hand ever went wrong. Those who were tempted and fell were all appointed in one short three-year period during which Dublin County Council was abolished and commissioners appointed to carry out its functions, as happened to Dublin Corporation. To my knowledge—and I have made exhaustive inquiries about this—no political appointee to the position of rate collector in that local authority area has ever been accused of doing away with one penny of the ratepayers' money.
That is a proud record. To a great extent it serves to justify my contention that, while the members of local authorities might have been faced with the unenviable task of making those appointments, they did not make them in any haphazard confettilike form. They made them carefully and judiciously. They took political affiliations into account—we would all be less than honest if we did not admit that fact—but nevertheless the appointments were made carefully and judiciously from within the ranks of their political parties.
I took grave exception to, and was personally hurt by, the remarks made by a reputable public representative in another place in relation to the activities of members of local authorities in connection with those appointments. I do not think it fair or good enough that any public representative elected to Dáil Éireann should have the gall, in relation to the appointment of rate collectors or the activities of the selfless, unpaid, dedicated members of the local authorities, to pass the casual, offhand remark that: "They will all be mourning tonight for the loss of their income". I am quoting from a document from which we are not allowed to quote in this House and it is contained in a debate on this Bill which was held in another place.
The contribution of the man who made that remark, and who continued his remarks by alleging that he knew of malpractices and of financial bribes taking place, lowered him in my estimation because, if he knew of such malpractices he should have taken action when he first heard about them. To my knowledge they did not take place in the local authority of which I have been a member for five and a half years, or in any other local authority with which I have come in contact in that time, or in any local authority on which any of my colleagues have served and with whom I have discussed the matter.
It is a deplorable state of affairs that any public representative, who has not taken the time or regarded it as his duty or his training, to even stand for election never mind serve on a local authority, should make a remark such as that. I could go through that debate and pick out the remarks of people such as Deputy Foley whose remarks were just as contentious, just as unfair and just as unfounded, in the light of his own inexperience and failure to stand for election.
