THE phrase “turkeys voting for Christmas’ comes to mind when gauging the response of local councillors to the report of the expenditure review group, An Bord Snip Nua, in relation to local authorities.
The report of the group, chaired by UCD economist Dr Colm McCarthy, proposes cutting the number of local authorities in the country from 34 to 22, with the abolition of regional authorities and town councils.
Many of the councillors felt that while reform of the local authority structure was desirable and necessary, they were all vehemently opposed to town councils being abolished. They also believed that it would be politically unwise of the government to take this action and it would therefore never happen.
Many councillors sit on both town and county councils. Fianna Fáil councillors Willie Callaghan in Naas and Fiona O’Loughlin in Newbridge both said the government would face pressure from their support base if they tried to abolish the town councils. Cllr O’Loughlin said, “There is no doubt about it that the government would face serious pressure if they tried to do this” while Cllr Callaghan said: “It would be a very wrong step for them to take in my view.”
Fine Gael Councillor Richard Daly (Athy) also sits on two local authorities and he said: “No government living in the real world is going to vote for the demise of local authorities - it’s just not going to happen.”
Newbridge Mayor Willie Hamilton (Labour) claimed that Dr McCarthy and his group had strayed from looking for savings in the public sector to doing away with democratic accountability.
“Town councils do have a function. The members are the closest people to the ground and those elected locally are best placed to exercise power in the best interests of the people they represent.”
For Naas Town Mayor Pat Clear, getting rid of local town councils would remove some of the personal element involved in the work that local councillors do. “It would be very undemocratic to get rid of them,” she said. “For Kildare County Council to run the whole of Athy, Leixlip, Celbridge, Newbridge and Naas - it just wouldn’t work.”
Athy Cathaoirleach Aoife Breslin of Labour concurred. “In my opinion there is very much a need for our local authorities. The problem has been in recent years that councils like Athy Town Council have not been given the proper funding and the role of the councillor has been eroded to give power to unelected officials. This has led to a democratic defecit,” she said.
Commenting on the forthcoming decisions to be made on the review group proposals, Kildare County Council spokesperson Charlie Talbot stated: “I think it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to pre-empt that process.”
Newbridge Town Clerk Anne Greene said that Newbridge Town Council was effectively unsustainable the way it is. “Newbridge does warrant having a town council but at the moment it has just a civic leadership function. It needs to either go one way or the other, it should either be abolished or built up,” she said. However she added that the political will needed to be there to carry out what needs to be done and added, “I am not sure that that political will is there.”
Naas Town Clerk Ken Kavanagh said that he would not be commenting on the issue at this time while Athy Town Clerk Brian O’Gorman noted that, contrary to the Bord Snip report, the forthcoming White Paper on Local Government was expected to propose that town government can be strengthened by allowing for greater devolution of local decisions from county to town level.