The Minister for the Environment, Mr Howlin, is, to be congratulated for his forthright commitment in Galway yesterday to a strategy for bringing about the long delayed reform of local government. Fianna Fail's promise to abolish rates in 1977, which gave the party its largest ever victory in a general election, created a monster that none of the political parties has been willing to deal with in spite of the consequences, for local politics', which have atrophied, and for the Exchequer which has had to carry a growing burden that ought to have been avoided.
Nearly 20 years have passed since then, and while Fine Gael and Labour have been eager to denounce the shortsightedness and fiscal stupidity of Fianna Fail's action, they have done nothing to change the situation because they have not been willing to court electoral unpopularity. The whole subject has suffered from the propensity of politicians not to take risks and from an underlying resistance at national level to devolving any real power to the local councils. More culpably, perhaps, no public debate has been instituted on how local government should be paid for, and what powers it should have.
Now, as some of the speakers pointed out at the annual conference of the General Council of County Councils, which Mr Howlin was addressing, a new form of local democracy is beginning to develop around single issues, particularly opposition to water charges. Nothing is more calculated to rally the political parties to a common flag than the thought that their monopoly on power is likely to be challenged.
Mr Howlin's suggestion that the "mood might be right" in other words, that the interests of the parties may be converging for consensus on the powers and finances of local government must be taken seriously. There is some scepticism about whether the Devolution Commission set up by the Government last year is intended as a genuine contribution to finding a solution or is merely a piece of camouflage to disguise inaction. Any doubt must be dispelled. With the first instalment of the KPMG report on financing expected shortly, the stage is almost set for the major debate that has been lacking up to now.
It may be too late, however, to head off the threat for some of the parties inherent in the near victory of Mr Joe Higgins in the Dublin West by election, and Fianna Fail will have to resist the temptation of facile vote hunting if it is to agree to a joint approach to local government reform. This is the only viable way of setting up a lasting structure which is not subject to periodic attacks for party political purposes, or likely to be destabilised by piecemeal decisions like the introduction of badly structured charges for water, sewage and refuse collection which have been responsible for the latest upheavals.
There would be more confidence in the honesty of Government members preparing for local government reform if they did not use it as an excuse for deferring a decision on the Residential Property Tax. As it stands, the RPT is not a local tax, and so there is no link with the larger issues of local financing. The distinction may not be clear to Ministers, but the growing number of voters who are affected by it, as a result of irrational developments in the property market, are unlikely to be impressed by another example of reluctance to face up to necessary decisions.