Pensions for local councillors have been ruled out, delegates at the Local Authority Members Association (Lama) annual conference in Kilkenny heard last night.
However, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Dick Roche, said the Government is looking at ways of increasing other types of financial support, such as expense allowances and retirement gratuity.
Councillors currently receive a taxable payment (one-quarter of a Senator's salary), which, according to Lama's general secretary Kevin Sheahan, is regarded by the Department of Finance and the Revenue Commissioners as a "Representation Allowance". Mr Sheahan said councillors are "morally entitled to a pension just as every other State employee is entitled to one". The delegates will hold a special debate on pensions today.
The Minister also told delegates that local authorities must become more responsive to members of the public who are "victims of voice-mail", which he described as a "modern scourge". He said: "If I can handle 50-60 messages a day, then a middle-ranking official can do so as well."
The main debate of the first day of the conference was anti-social behaviour, with delegates from around the country raising issues including drug-dealing on housing estates, noisy neighbours, public drunkenness and vandalism. The Minister said the government is devoting "huge energy to dealing equitably and realistically with this problem", including funding for CCTV projects in local authority areas and new joint local authority- Garda policing committees.
Referring to the forthcoming Housing Bill, he said "the right to be housed is subject to the common good" and that the proposed new legislation will strengthen the powers of local authorities to deal with anti-social behaviour in their own housing estates.
But one of the guest speakers, Michael Murray, the State solicitor for Limerick, who addressed the conference after the Minister had departed, said anti-social behaviour "is a cancer in our society". He said that "many judges were out of touch" and that unless urgent and radical measures are taken "this country and its housing estates will become ungovernable and hell to live in".
Mr Murray said that "we have corralled problem people into ghettoes within housing estates" and called for an "intelligent zero tolerance policy" which would involve a co-ordinated approach by social agencies, gardaí and the courts.
Mr Murray said Limerick city would be "an ideal test-tube" for such a strategy. He said the Garda Síochána is under-resourced, pointing out that in 1951 there were 2.34 gardaí per 1,000 people and in 2002 that figure had risen to only 2.41.