Sir, – I'm disappointed that your editorial ("Local government reform – diminishing Cork city", September 9th), on the prospective merger of the Cork councils, did not provide a basis for your dismissive comments, such as a reference to the "unfortunate" cases of Limerick and Waterford.
What most commentators who cite Dublin city as the pre-eminent city in Ireland fail to observe is that there is a substantial level of inter-council co-operation at executive level in the Dublin region and this co-operation is a substantial driving force in the development of the region as a whole.
How Cork county can expect to compete with Dublin if it remains divided is a question that needs answering. Indeed, your comment about cities being “absorbed” by their counties displays an inferiority complex that has no place in local government in Ireland. Maybe Cork’s future might be best described as “together we stand, divided we fail”. – Yours, etc,
TONY O’BRIEN,
Monkstown,
Co Dublin.
Sir, – The Cork boundary report recommends that the new unified authority be subdivided into a metropolitan division and two municipal divisions in the northeast and southwest.
While one might welcome the formation of a metropolitan area that extends the existing wholly inadequate city boundaries, two questions arise.
First, what have the two new municipal divisions got in common with the new metropolitan area? For example, from an economic development perspective, the Castletownbeare peninsula has more in common with the Dingle peninsula than it has with Cork city and its surrounds. An alternative and more transformative proposal would have been for the Minister for the Environment and Local Government Alan Kelly to widen the terms of reference to develop an integrated rural development strategy for areas of Ireland that are not contained in any of its metropolitan centres. Such a strategy might enable these areas to consider the optimal arrangements for their own development centred around activities such as tourism, agriculture and fishing.
Second, I would suggest that for Ireland’s second city (and indeed Ireland’s other metropolitan areas) to thrive as a driver of national economic development, requires genuine decentralisation of control and responsibility by the centre to metropolitan authorities with mayors that are elected by the public and that have tax-raising powers. Of course such a radical proposal, which would promote bottom-up development so that metropolitan areas could have some degree of control of their own destinies, was also outside the terms of reference set by the Minister.
The underlying problem with all of this is that Ireland’s overcentralised government, which has been tinkering with boundary issues for decades, refuses to consider that it is perhaps the greatest obstacle to Irish economic development.
The piecemeal approach by this and previous governments to so-called local government reform, county by county, smacks of nothing more than parish-pump politics. – Yours, etc,
Dr EOIN O’LEARY,
Senior Lecturer,
Institute of Business
Development
and Competitiveness,
School of Economics,
University College Cork.
Sir, – The proposal to merge Cork city and council into one mega-council is being justified by the conclusion that the alternative, an enlarged city, “would lead to difficulties preventing urban sprawl and make it harder to focus on the city”.
This notion is flawed, for a couple of reasons – a combined Cork authority would have around the same population as Dublin City Council, spread over an area that comprises roughly 10 per cent of the State’s entire land area. So there is hardly an incentive to prevent the outward sprawl of the city.
Considering that the entirety of Cork city only makes for a population of 225,000 compared to the 290,000 living in the rest of the county, it also escapes me how a unified Cork council would lead to a better focus on the city than the alternative. The alternative being, of course, an expanded Cork city council that would inevitably be focused exclusively on the city it would be responsible for. – Yours, etc,
TOMÁS M CREAMER,
Ballinamore,
Co Leitrim.