When we were last speaking on this the Minister was quite excited about the prospect of the Gallery filling up, or else he was just kicking for touch until such time as his advisers could script out the answers to the questions that were asked. I regret that in his reply now the dismal performance of other members of the Cabinet seems to have spilled over on to that side of the House in general.
A number of questions in relation to section 10 of this Bill were raised. Instead of getting replies on how it would function we have been talking about local elections, taxpayers, the underpaid sections of the community and Uncle Tom Cobley and all, and we have not come back to the nub of this thing. The Minister is trying to skate over a total change in the way in which local government will from now on function. He is confusing legislation with his honeymoon period in office and assuming that the performance in the Custom House and the Department of the Environment will always be equivalent to what has happened in the last year.
If that is the basis on which the Minister for the Environment proposes to draft legislation it is an extraordinarily inadequate basis. We are not talking about how the Minister performed over the last year. That is not relevant to this Bill. We are talking about something that is going to become the law of the land. If we want to talk about precedent either in the last year or in previous years the outcome of that precedent is that in every area local government has come into conflict with central Government over the allocation of resources or over economy the body that has won out time and again has been central Government. The only area that comes immediately to mind in the last administration where some degree of autonomy was restored to local authority was capital expenditure, where in housing local authorities did not have to submit schemes of more than 15 units or more for approval from the Customs House.
The history of local government, which is buried deep into the structure of section 10 of the Bill, is that every time Fianna Fáil come into office in one way or another they chip away at the autonomy and powers of local government. In the second inter-party Government, the amendment of the Managerial Act and the role of the manager in all of this are significant. The role of the county manager, which to that day in 1955 was unshackled in any form, was modified with what is commonly referred to as the section 4 clause in the 1955 legislation brought in by Deputy "Pa" O'Donnell.
This section 10 is a sophisticated instrument. It lacks all of the crudity of the Deputy Kevin Boland blunderbuss that was applied to Dublin Corporation and Bray Urban District Council in 1969. Even that side of the House learned something. They have learned that you do not kill or abolish a local authority if their finances go beyond what you yourself can afford. This is a much milder, sophisticated, but nevertheless equally effective system of neutering the financial autonomy of a local body. The Minister has not gone through the section. He has not explained how it is going to function. He has not explained the latter clauses in relation to the role of the manager. Instead, he has been attempting to kick up a bowl of dust in this House, throwing the responsibility for any kind of comment back to the other side of the House. He has been talking about local elections and about putting rates back on houses, when what this House is now doing or is supposed to do—perhaps I am not here long enough to understand the real processes—is to make laws on Committee Stage. Instead of getting replies we are getting a lot of hot air from the other side.
The Minister's main defence of the extraordinary powers he is taking into his hands in section 10 is that there is a Fianna Fáil commitment in the manifesto to protect the interest of ratepayers who would not benefit from exemption under this overall legislation, and that they are going to protect them and protect the taxpayer and, included in that, non-residential ratepayers of one kind or another. If the Minister is taking that responsibility upon himself I would like to know, as Fianna Fáil's Minister for the Environment, what class of responsibility does he regard the Fianna Fáil majority Members of the local county council of Clare, for example, as having? Have they any responsibility in this regard? What autonomy or responsibility does he regard as resting with the majority Fianna Fáil councillors in Cork Corporation? Have they any responsibility to the taxpayers or are they not covered by the manifesto in the same way that the Minister is? Because repeatedly coming from that side of the House is a total denial of the essential role of local democracy. It is not local democracy as far as Fianna Fáil are concerned; it is local administration. The Government are consistently and regularly, whenever they get the opportunity, turning the screw tighter and tighter and tighter to the extent that the degree of autonomy and individualism which should be the cornerstone of our local democratic system is being reduced and replaced by a centralised government.
That is bad enough for openers, but my regret in this instance is that the monitoring and control of local government as a result of this legislation taking effect will not even rest with the Minister's own Department. As I said on previous occasions, it will now shift out of the Custom House and over to the Department of Finance in a more savage and direct way than it previously was. The reality of this provision is going to be that a principal officer or even an assistant principal officer in the Department of Finance is going to start dictating, by way of directive as set out in this section, to local authorities up and down the country through the auspices of the Department of the Environment how much money they can have and how much money they can not have. If that is the case, the Minister knows that, irrespective of him being Minister or not, the day may come when someone who does not necessarily have his commitment to local government but has a somewhat lesser commitment will sit in the office with this legal instrument in his hands. That is what we have to deal with. The day may come when there really will be no point in having local elected councillors. Have no fear about it, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle, this was one of the last two major reserved functions a local authority had and we have already heard noises from the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy giving out about the state of planning legislation here. It is quite clear that it will not be long, if Fianna Fáil have their way, before even the reserved function as regards the making of a development plan will be seen as constituting some kind of danger and that will go too. At the moment this was a major reserved function with limits to it. There were always limits to it but the limits were extreme limits and, as we saw in the Kevin Boland incident, were not used all that frequently and when they were used there was some kind of public recognition of what actually was happening and the Minister had publicly to chop off the head of a local authority and not do it in the dark or behind closed doors, which is now going to be the effect of this provision in section 10.
Why bother having local elected representatives? Why bother having them at all if we have a county managerial system and a local administrative staff and this provision in section 10? What are the local representatives going to do? Are they going to open the door for delegations from one part of the county or another to come and see the manager to ask the manager will he spend money or not? This is implicit in all of this, and the Minister has not effectively answered that argument. Instead he has been talking about local elections. We are talking about the making of law, and this law when it does become law will allow the Minister to set a limit to the amount of money that a local authority can raise unilaterally by way of the rates in its area. He does not say, for example, as he could have said, in order to protect the taxpayer and because we are abolishing rates on residential properties and associated properties that he would confine the direction of his limit to that portion of the rateable valuations within the area and leave it to the local representatives to be answerable themselves to the businessmen of that particular community or the ratepayers of that community who, as the Minister has readily conceded, have in the past been answerable to the extent that coming up to election years they would reduce the cost of the rates for the very reason that they were acutely aware of how accountable they were. "Out of the mouths of babes", I think the quotation is. The Minister is not a stranger to it, so it is a spurious argument, it is a dishonest argument, to say that they are taking this overall power into their hands in order to protect the interests of the non-residential ratepayer because their interests are presumably protected by the people they themselves elect on to local councils.
Is the Minister seriously trying to tell me that the Fianna Fáil councillors in County Clare would not represent the interests of the business community? Is he seriously trying to suggest that the councillors of Cork Corporation who are in the majority members of the Fianna Fáil Party would turn around and consistently milk the business community because they do not represent them? Is that what the Minister is saying, because it is implicit in his argument? If that is what he is saying, that he as Minister for the Environment does not trust Fianna Fáil councillors up and down the country, let him say that loudly and clearly in this House and at the next Fianna Fáil Árd-Fheis. Let him not hide behind a dishonest attempt to say that he is protecting the weaker sections of the community. They do not pay rates and they will not be hit by this provision, and it is a dishonest argument to suggest that he is protecting the lower paid members of the community who do not have to pay rates anyway.
The first obvious amendment to this provision is to confine the direction of the limit to the categories of buildings which would become exempt from the payment of rates as a result of this overall legislation becoming law. That is the first obvious amendment. Let us just look at that limit well. The Minister, confusing his own period in office with the creation of law, talks about the performance of the 11 per cent limit last year. He has said quite accurately and correctly that indeed many local authorities including the two that he quoted in the Cavan-Monaghan constituency—Carrickmacross and Clones were the two towns he mentioned—as having not needed the 11 per cent. He remarks with some degree of surprise that this should be so. I would like to know if he is still surprised at the figure, what he has been learning in the Department of the Environment for the last year, because if he seriously thinks that every local authority has exactly the same percentage need in terms of an increase of money due to it and that one single limit will be sufficient, then unfortunately this country is in for a bad period of stewardship from the Custom House. In the foot of today's Irish Times there is a story in relation to population surveys which I only had an opportunity to scan. The population survey, which regrettably we have to take in the unfortunate and very regrettable absence of the census which we should now have, shows that the population is growing at a rate even faster than had been anticipated, but nobody is suggesting that it is growing at the same rate in every county in the country or in every local authority in the country. It is that fundamental fact of population rate of growth alone that has generated a need for a source of services at a differential rate of demand in each local authority.
The word "limit" is mentioned a number of times in this section. Despite repeated questions to the Minister on Committee Stage and at other times in the House he has refused to give any indication how the limit is to be calculated or if it will be a differential limit for different authorities. We are being asked to approve a section which gives those explicit powers, where the manager becomes the spy in the cab, as Deputy Fitzpatrick suggested, or the runner in the council, who will carry out the provisions of this Bill on behalf of the Minister. We do not know what the limit will be.
I am concerned about the autonomy of local authorities. If a new subsection was added to this section, which showed local authorities how the limit might be calculated and the factors which would be made an essential part of any formula for calculation, we would have less fears about its provisions. We have had some interesting general speeches which have not got to the core of the section, one of the longest in the Bill. The Minister has not shown us how this limit will be calculated nor has he even suggested in the section some of the factors that will have to be taken into account in considering the limit for local authorities.
In other European countries the State directly finances the expenditure of local authorities. In the Netherlands the local authority expenditure accounts for 50 per cent of overall public expenditure and 14 per cent of GNP grants from central Government account for 88 per cent of local authority revenue. There is a degree of autonomy in the receipt of that money which is totally absent from the provisions of this Bill. There is a similar type of provision under a different system of money collection in Denmark. The way in which an increase in money for any local authority in any of those places is calculated is on the basis of certain objective factors, such as population increase, the structure of that particular population, the rate of organisation, the industrial growth in the area and so on. The variables involved in the Netherlands can amount to as high as 20. None of them depends on how much the Minister for the Environment can bargain around the Cabinet table at the end of any year prior to the financial year starting with the budget in February of the following year.
The Minister has not explicitly told the House how this money is calculated but he has said quite clearly to me, in reply to a repeated question from me on the adjournment debate, that one day he would tell me how a Government meeting actually works and then I would be the wiser. The only information which came from the Minister that night was that statement. The inference, until we are told otherwise, is that the Minister for the Environment did not know on 23 November what he would have available for local authorities and he did not know last Tuesday night what he would have. He still does not know. He knows even less now because the cash they thought was coming from Brussels on 1 January, has started to disappear.
There is total confusion in the Department of the Environment and with the Minister and his Minister of State about how much money will be available. There is no guarantee of the smallest amount of money a local authority can get because there is no way in which that money is to be calculated or safeguarded by reference to legislation in this section. We are left with a Bill which mentions the consent of the Minister for Finance at the beginning of it, no guarantees for calculation of the limit and, consequently, a legislative factor which will result in the Minister for the Environment of the day having to fight his corner with other Ministers around the Cabinet table for a portion of available resources.
