Minority report – why the voices against Cork council merger plan are right

As an undergraduate student in University College Cork in the early 1990s I loved my public administration lectures delivered by Richard Haslam and Edward Marnane. Both men were steeped in local government and were true localists. I found Richard (Dick) Haslam especially inspiring and he subsequently became my mentor and a loyal friend. Dick kept his lectures fairly simple; his primary argument was that local government should be local. The whole point of having local institutions of democracy was that they were close to the ground and accessible to people. Dick was a fan of JS Mill who had another fairly simple message – national government should handle national matters, local government should handle local matters. The great local government scholar, AH Marshall was another favourite who was often cited — especially his statement that in a democratic country there should be room for two distinct levels of government and the local level should not to be compelled to live in perpetual fear of a centralising vortex. I regularly had nightmares about this centralising vortex.

It is against this background that I analyse recent local government developments in Ireland and the freshly published expert report on local government reorganisation in Cork.

To begin at the national level, there is a clear trend of centralisation which nobody can deny. Before the June 2014 local elections, there were 114 local authorities in Ireland. We now have 31, following the abolition of the entire municipal/town tier and mergers in Waterford, Limerick and Tipperary. A merger of the county and city councils had been recommended in Cork and it is highly likely that a similar recommendation will be made for Galway. Thus we face the real prospect of shortly only having 29 local authorities in Ireland, with just one city council based in Dublin.

This obsession with rationalisation conveniently ignores the international evidence which refutes the notion that a smaller number of larger local authorities yields improvements, savings and efficiencies. Quite often, the exact opposite is true. Unsurprisingly citizens also feel detached from their local authority the bigger it becomes.

This international evidence has not been swept under the carpet by Professor Dermot Keogh and Dr Theresa Reidy, the two members from the Cork expert group of five who dissented from the recommendation that Cork County Council and Cork City Council should be merged. Their minority report should be carefully read, even though it can be hard to find as it is disrespectfully tucked away in Appendix 6 of the report. Keogh and Reidy favour the retention of the two local authorities with a much-needed boundary extension to the city.

The majority view from the expert group (three from five) is that a merger should take place and this option has been enthusiastically endorsed by Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly.

The majority report, however, has some serious flaws, inconsistencies and contradictions. It is also very naïve. Rather than focus on positive aspects of an amalgamation it is written in a negative way about the difficulties that a boundary extension would bring.

For example, the report states that a large boundary extension would require approximately 400 council staff to transfer from the county to the city. This is deemed a logistical nightmare and would present ‘major challenges’. Yet, the report argues that an amalgamation would work well and the complexities of merging these two large local authorities are underplayed.

The report further asserts that various boundary extension efforts in Cork have failed during the past 50 years and has led to acrimony between the two councils. This does not suggest a happy marriage especially as one of the partners, Cork City Council, is being dragged unwillingly to the altar.

One of the more bizarre claims in the report is that a merger would bring Cork in line with its European counterparts. How many European urban centres have no independent local government authority? In many ways this is the kernel of the problem. A merger of the two authorities means the abolition of Cork City Council. Its status would be reduced to a division of the new unified local authority which would have 86 elected members. Thus the councillors representing the city would have to fight for a fair share of resources in this unwieldly 86-member council.

The fear, as expressed by Keogh and Reidy, is that Cork city would consistently be outvoted by the other two proposed districts and there would be a cycle of 'never-ending negotiation and bargaining'. This point has also been made by Fianna Fáil leader, Micheál Martin, who has predicted that the city will be 'marginalised and outvoted.' Perhaps in an effort to avoid this, the report recommends that the minister should devolve significant functions and powers to the Cork Metropolitan Division. This is a vague recommendation and, though well-intentioned, is extremely naïve. Since the foundation of the state, central government in Ireland has not tended to devolve powers to local government. Instead, the stripping of powers from local government has happened consistently.

The report also has some confusing aspects and parts of it read like a classical fudge — we’ll have a merger and a boundary extension.

It recommends that the office of Lord Mayor be retained in the city, the city would have a chief executive and operations would still be centred in City Hall. In addition, as mentioned above, the Metropolitan Division ‘should’ be given significant powers and, for good measure, its jurisdictional boundary would be extended to encompass a population of nearly 290,000 people (there are approximately 119,000 people within the current Cork City Council jurisdiction). It is tempting to ask, where is the merger? There is a very real concern — as in Waterford and Limerick — that you would end up with a merger in name only.

Furthermore the report states that consideration should be given to the option of having a directly elected Lord Mayor in the city. Would this Lord Mayor however not be in a subservient position to the mayor of the unified authority? Is it proposed that this mayor would be directly elected too?

The majority report is poorly written and disappointing in that it leaves us with more questions than answers. The Implementation Group will have a major job of work to fill in the gaps and work out the missing details if the unified local authority in Cork is to be in place for the 2019 local elections. It is telling that the Cork expert review group could not reach a consensus.

Dr Aodh Quinlivan is a lecturer in the Department of Government, University College Cork, where he specialises in local government. His latest publication, The Changing Nature of Local Government in Ireland, is being launched in UCC on September 16th.