ADRIAN J. ENGLISH,
Madam, - In the opening sentence of your second Editorial of February 1st, you rightly point out that "the Coalition Government appears to be in the process of transferring responsibility for local authority funding to a system of local taxation".
While you conclude that Environment Minister Cullen's Protection of the Environment Bill, 2003, which gives city and county managers the power to impose waste charges, will have an unfortunate effect on local democracy, I believe that you lay insufficient stress on the dangerously anti-democratic potential of the philosophy embodied in this piece of proposed legislation.
Indeed, one wonders if Mr Cullen himself realises the erosion of the powers not only of his own office and that of his Cabinet colleagues but of our democratic system of government itself which is inherent in this proposal.
City and county managers, appointed bureaucrats with very far-ranging powers and only very limited and ill-defined accountability in the exercise thereof, already enjoy the statutory ability to over-ride the wishes of the democratically elected members of local authorities in all matters other than those relating to physical planning.
With the almost certain imminence of charges for water and other infra-structural services and the hinted possibility of the introduction of local income and sales taxes, it would now appear that these functionaries are to be given the ultimate power to levy taxation with no democratic accountability.
Our legislators, in considering this piece of proposed legislation might well consider that, rather than increasing the existing powers of city and county managers, they might usefully address the democratic deficit in our existing system of local government which effectively limits the power of the elected members of local authorities to the perversion of the planning process. - Yours, etc.,
ADRIAN J. ENGLISH, Kilcolman Court, Glenageary, Co Dublin.