The Minister in his opening speech some weeks ago made reference to the publication of a White Paper concerning the restructuring of local government. This was the subject of commentary from various organisations. I should like to comment briefly on one or two points in that paper. One must admit to a feeling of disappointment on reading through this long report—an overdue report—that it did not represent a more probing examination of the entire system of local government and that it was restricted to an examination of the known local government structure, with the result that the eventual Green Paper apparently assumed as a good model for evolutionary development the existing structure, while admitting that that system is the product of haphazard growth and local organisation based on legislation left over by British Parliaments, and so on. This restriction of the examination to the existing local government system, as an unalterable point of departure, devalues the whole report.
For people residing in the Dublin area, presumably, the big talking point in regard to this report has been, in fact, the really significant change suggested, the creation of the Greater Dublin Area Authority, the proposal to amalgamate and merge Dublin Corporation, of happy memory, Dublin County Council, still with us, Dún Laoghaire Borough Council and Balbriggan Town Commissioners. This proposal has received a good deal of adverse comment from those councillors and those people versed in local government and certainly from those in the Dublin area who are conscious of the lack of participation at local level on the part of the ordinary citizen.
The suggestion is, to say the least, impracticable. To those of us who have experience of the absence of participation of the citizen in local government in the Dublin area, the problem has been that the corporation is something in respect of which he is not consulted save at seven-yearly intervals, under the Local Election Act of 1960. In 1967 we were promised local elections on a five-yearly basis. Up to now, at infrequent intervals, the citizen, the property owner, was consulted at the local election and that was the last consultation that took place between him and his elected representatives until the next local election. If the proposal in the White Paper is carried through it will make it even more difficult than it now is. Those who forecast movement of population over the next few years agree that at least onethird of the population of the country will be concentrated in the Dublin area in the next ten to fifteen years. In fact, one commentator has called the concept of the Greater Dublin Area Authority a mini-Dáil.
This Green Paper claims to be inspired by modern examples elsewhere. It is extraordinary that we should be thinking of this larger area of authority when the tendency elsewhere is to give back power to what they call the neighbourhood, to have neighbourhood power rather than great authority power. In reorganising local government, we should see how much authority, power and real decisionmaking can be restored to people in their own neighbourhoods. This has been done elsewhere. It is certainly the thinking elsewhere. It is regrettable that the local government reorganisation paper should give such little evidence of any thinking in this direction.
Earlier this century the city of Dublin was broken up into different local authority areas. One monument to that is the Rathmines Town Hall. I would suggest that we must go back to that model rather than to what is proposed in this document here, a Greater Dublin area. It may be thought that the larger the unit the more efficiently things can be done. People can be given more power, more real say at local level and that can be associated with greater efficiency in the carrying out of functions. We can break up an area into small, democratic units of decision-making and at the same time tie this in with overall efficiency in a given operational area in the provision of housing and other essential services. There is no contradiction between the objectives of the one and the other.
It appears from my reading of this paper and from the commentaries of others that the thinking of the Department is towards the larger unit at the cost of the individual importance of neighbourhoods or people. This is a very wrong emphasis. The Dublin Corporation was abolished by ministerial edict and one wonders what would happen if in future the greater Dublin authority saw fit to reject some ministeral order in the matter of the carrying out of their functions. We would then find one-third of the population deprived of their ordinary local authority rights.
It is questionable as to whether or not this White Paper on the reorganisation of local government is just another page in the sheaf of surveys and examinations which have been such a feature of Government in recent years. The Department of Local Government are not immune from the disease of the Fianna Fáil administration. It is questionable whether any of the proposals or suggestions contained in this White Paper will be implemented. One is struck by the academic nature of the report. The Minister has given local bodies, at their request, until June next to reply to this paper, but it has also been suggested that local authority elections may take place in June of next year.
