Town councils need reform, not abolition
WEEKEND REVELATIONS that Environment Minister Phil Hogan is thinking of cutting the number of town councils throughout the country will provoke a furious reaction from a horde of threatened councillors, if not those they represent.
This won't be confined to councillors from the opposition parties either, for the Fine Gael and Labour Party local representatives are every bit as much under threat and are likely to be not in the least enamoured with the prospect of being turfed out of their chambers.
Minister Hogan's thinking is that county councils should be well able to deal with the administration of towns within their remit without the need for another layer of local bureaucracy and democracy. Of course, he is also looking at the potential savings to be made by dispensing with a whole raft of councillors and their payments and expenses.
Minister Hogan makes a fair point about the duplication of services, but hard times or not, there's no denying the democracy issue gives pretty solid ground for opposing his plan. Town councils often come across as pointless talking shops, inhabited by people with little vision, direction or leadership to offer the people they are elected to represent. Debates can drag on for year after year of tedious whinging and back-biting about something as mundane as the provision of public toilets, car parking or planting flowers on a roundabout.
There is another way of looking at councils however, Town councils bring democracy as close to the people as it is possible to get. They offer residents and business people in a town an opportunity to elect and have direct access to the people who make decisions about matters that, small though they may be, are of genuine local importance and have a real and tangible effect on people's lives. The fact that it doesn't always work out that way is our own fault if we elect people who aren't up to the job.
In a country where sovereignty is so compromised that our national budget is framed in Brussels and discussed in Berlin before we ever get to hear what pain is coming our way, it might seem a very small step to move local representation from county towns to the county capital.
We'll be told it is all in the interest of efficiency and cost effectiveness, and indeed that might be so. However, we would be foolish to allow cold efficiency to be ranked as more important than the voice of the people and their right to determine the running of their local affairs.
If town councils don't work properly then they should be reformed, not abolished. If costs must be cut, then cut councillors' expenses and ban the conference trips that have made a laughing stock of some councils. They could even be reconstituted to run on an entirely voluntary basis that involves no cost -- and they might even be the better for that. What is important though is that we don't see a further erosion of democracy. After all, the voice of the people does matter and at the rate this country is going down the tubes, a voice is all many people have left.
