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While I have you..with Martin Byrnes
BY the time the lads at the back of The Dog and Mallet had all had their say, they had abolished the Senate, halved the size of the Dail, sacked all the junior ministers, and reduced the cabinet to about seven.
They had also decided that councillors were an expensive extravagance which could be done without because local services could be supervised by county and city managers-and there were probably too many of those as well.
On the point of abolishing councils, one voice calmly demurred: "... which would explain how Ireland has developed a worldclass health service since we abolished the health boards and centralised everything into the HSE six years ago." There was a pause.
"Wise guy! You know exactly what we mean" was the eventual response. The lads were not ones to allow mere facts stand in the way of a good argument. For my own part, I thought it best to remain tangential to the increasingly rambling discussion. But I did find some merit in what they had been saying. We could do without an upper house.
Bigger countries than this one do. We could get by with fewer TDs, provided that they did what they are elected as legislators to do, and not go around having potholes filled and endlessly looking over their shoulders at electoral competition from within their own parties.
When ministers of state were called parliamentary secretaries, there were generally between five and seven of them and only two of those had very much to do. The chief whip managed the business of the Dail and the man at finance ran the Office of Public Works. Today, we have 20 ministers of state and I doubt if half of them could tell you their full titles.
The cabinet is constitutionally capped at 15 members, and we didn't always fill the quota in the past, but now we have the phenomenon of the "super junior", ministers of state who sit as cabinet ministers in every respect other than when it comes to counting heads they don't have one.
In times of national crisis it is common practice to reduce the size of the executive. As we are in a crisis now, shedding much of the cabinet mightn't be so bad an idea.
(An Italian industrialist was once asked the secret of the success of his company. "Simple," he said. "Always ensure that the board consists of an uneven number of directors. And three is too many.)
But I couldn't bring myself to contemplate doing away with councillors. To do without councillors would be to deprive the plain people of a cherished amusement in which an ordinary person can be a participant as well as an observer.
Councillors are the interface between the plain people and officialdom. Anyone with a gripe, however unfounded, can approach a councillor sure in the knowledge that at least a letter will be written or a phone call made, even if all the other councillors for the area had already done so and had been politely rebuffed.
Newly elected councillors, in particular, are the bane of the lives of officials because they keep re-inventing the wheel by submitting no-hope representations about long rejected applications. Another reason for hanging on to councillors is the empirical fact that the people want them.
Here in Limerick, city and county, well over half of the electorate voted this June. They may have voted as they did on the day for any number of reasons, but the fact is that they voted.
Those of us old enough to remember the Ballymagash Urban District Council sketches on RTE's Hall's Pictorial Weekly are also old enough to remember the furious reaction to them by councillors all across the country, and nowhere more so than here. In both city and county councils, Limerick's elected representatives ranted and fumed and hurled recriminations, saying how local democracy was being debased by such a programme, little realising that they themselves were being every bit as outrageous as Eamonn Morrissey, Frank Kelly, et al, were in their televised lampooning.
I believe, however, that the 12 years of "Hall's Pic", which ended in 1982, did a lot to bring councils and councillors closer to the people by removing the sanctimonious cloak from what is, and should be, just simple local government. You get a somewhat different kind of councillor these times.
In the days of Hall's Pic, and indeed for a decade after it, county councillors were mainly farmers, shopkeepers (including publicans) and teachers. In other words they were drawn from the type of occupations in which people could arrange their time to attend, unpaid, to the duties of a councillor.
Councillors now get a small salary and can also claim justified expenses. Some even manage to survive on being a councillor. The lads in The Dog and Mallet might want to abolish councillors, but I know to whom they would go if a pothole were to appear in front of any of their houses.
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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