The annual farce of the election of mayors around the country is taking place at present. Tinsel offices for would-be TDs. Opportunities for the puffing of egos and profiles. No power, no relevance, writes Vincent Browne
Is there a person in the natural world who would name the last four mayors of Dublin? Most of us would struggle to name the outgoing mayor. In contrast, most of us could name the mayor of London and the mayor of New York. There the mayors have power, relevance and clout. Here? Nothing.
Central government here decides everything, except rezonings. It decides on the budgets for local authorities, it decides on infrastructural development, it decides on policing, transport and the regeneration of disadvantaged areas or the degradation of disadvantaged areas.
I suspect that in 2001 Noel Dempsey wanted to give local authorities more power in legislation he introduced, the Local Government Bill 2000, but his Cabinet colleagues were having none of it. There was no delegation of powers and functions to local authorities in that Bill. It did end the dual mandate (TDs and Senators could not remain members of local authorities), and it did introduce payments for members of such bodies and an incentivised scrappage scheme for councillors who had been in office for decades. He also provided for the direct elections of chairpersons and mayors of local councils.
He had a lot of trouble getting this through the Dáil. The Fianna Fáil gene-pool TDs, who were keeping that Fianna Fáil/PD government in office, were infuriated by the ending of the dual mandate, as were Fianna Fáil backbenchers but Dempsey held firm and largely got his way.
The direct election of mayors could have been interesting. Had that happened, the emasculation of local government could hardly have persisted. Yes, there were problems with direct elections - or at least there could have been problems if local authorities had any real powers - for the mayor might well be from outside the majority group on the council. But it would have led to pressures to increase the powers of local authorities, perhaps reverting to a power to impose taxation of some sort.
The abolition of domestic rates in the 1970s, while welcome in that it ended a taxation system that was unfair, left local authorities entirely beholden to central government.
If there were a directly elected mayor of, say, Limerick - someone who had campaigned to deal with the huge areas of disadvantage in the city and, through that, with much of the crime problem there - isn't it likely that central government would have been pressurised sooner or later into ceding the powers to the local authority to meet that demand? Similarly in Dublin, if there were a directly elected mayor committed to resolving the traffic chaos, wouldn't that put pressure on central government to cede responsibility for that? To cede to local authorities new revenue-raising powers, such as toll taxes, property taxes and even income taxes? And wouldn't the delegation of some policing powers also be sensible? Local communities know their policing requirements best, so why not give them powers over policing? Not for policing overall, but local policing? Instead of beefing up Noel Dempsey's Bill, his successor in Environment, the wondrous Martin Cullen, amended the Bill to remove direct elections of mayors.
What's so bad about the mayor of London having considerable powers, or the mayor of Paris or New York? Why, if it works there, should it not work here? The spectacle of what local councillors did with their delegated powers on planning 10 or 15 years ago is not encouraging in this context, it must be conceded. That a number of councillors on Dublin country councils took "donations" from developers, whom they went on to enrich massively through rezoning decisions, was and is scandalous. In some instances, it didn't matter that much because land needed to be rezoned, but in other instances it mattered massively.
For instance, in Quarryvale or what is now known as Liffey Valley; a town centre with all the amenities associated with a town centre was to be provided for a population of over 30,000 at Neilstown. This was subverted by the decision to accommodate developers at Liffey Valley, which attracted all the major retail units that might have located at Neilstown, which means Neilstown never got a town centre. Too bad for the 30,000 locals.
But it is hardly beyond the imagination of our legislators to provide safeguards against such abuses - getting rid of all private political donations is an obvious starting point. The periodic hand-wringing over electoral apathy might be replaced by consideration of measures that would involve the citizenry more in their own government. One such means is to devolve powers to local councils on transport, policing and infrastructural development and to provide for a direct say by the citizen on some of these issues.
This makes far more sense than the airhead decentralisation policies of the present crowd. Those are going nowhere.