On January 15th, the Minister for the Environment and Local Government, Alan Kelly TD, announced the appointment of a statutory committee of experts to review over the next nine months the Cork city boundary and other local government arrangements, specifically the option of unifying the existing city and county structures.
The Minister said it was important that Cork city and county would not be held back in terms of economic progress, the implication being that the current structural arrangements are an impediment to development. That may well be the case but, in my opinion, structure is only one part of the story. The primary impediment to progress is the local government system itself.
Cork wants to become a strong, vibrant European metropolitan region. Across Europe, where you have strong metropolitan regions you invariably have strong local government with directly elected mayors, significant resources, autonomy from the centre and responsibility for a wide range of functions including transport, policing, education and tourism.
We have a tendency in Ireland to focus on micro-level debates on structure and form to such an extent that we miss the bigger macro-level issues. At no point do we step back and ask more fundamental questions like: what kind of local government system do we want in 21st-century Ireland? What services should that local government system be providing? What is the role of the state? What is the optimal scale and scope of government? I believe if we are able to provide answers to these questions and establish first principles, then structures will follow more naturally.
On the specific question of whether Cork city needs a boundary extension, I think the answer is yes. It has been 50 years since we had an extension, much has changed and the city has outgrown its boundary. Most people living in Cork suburbs such as Togher, Doughcloyne, Douglas, Donnybrook, Grange and Rochestown regard themselves as living in the city, but this is not necessarily the case. The introduction of the local property tax has made some people realise they live in the county council jurisdiction as opposed to the city. Back in 2012, the then local government minister, Phil Hogan, agreed that a boundary extension was required in Cork and he gave the city and county councils five years to draft an acceptable plan. This was never likely to happen. The boundary has been a divisive issue for years in local Cork politics, with the county perceiving an extension as a “land grab” and being fearful of a significant loss of commercial rates. Alan Kelly is right to step in and try to drive the process with greater urgency.
City and county
The second issue is more complex. The Minister has asked the review group, chaired by Alf Smiddy, to consider the option of unifying the city and county structures “in view of the potential benefits such as strengthening local government, elimination of administrative duplication, improved service delivery, greater efficiency, economies of scale and more cohesive and effective economic development”.
In terms of strengthening local government, I return to my earlier point about the local government system as a whole and its capacity. If you have two local authorities such as Cork City and County Council within a system where councils lack autonomy, have very few powers and are centrally controlled then merging them into one authority without altering the system achieves very little.
The other arguments around efficiency and economies of scale warrant close examination. We might intuitively think that merging two local authorities into one would lead to efficiencies, but public policy should not be formulated on the basis of intuition but on evidence.
The Smiddy review group has the opportunity to examine evidence from other jurisdictions and take stock of the conceptual and empirical arguments used to champion the case for local government amalgamation. International research on the optimal size of local government suggests a weak link between size and costs.
In many instances, local authority mergers have limited intrinsic efficiency value and involve large transactional costs. Structural reforms and the redrawing of local authority boundaries are not cost-free exercises and economies of scale tend not to accrue when you have labour-intensive local government service delivery.
Folklore
Two of the UK’s leading experts on local government, Peter John and Colin Copus, have concluded, “common folklore in local government is that big is better and more efficient, a conclusion not borne out by research”. It should also be noted that alternatives to amalgamation exist in the form of collaborative partnerships with shared services.
Whatever system of local governance for Cork is recommended by the Smiddy group, it must be recognised that efficiencies and economies of scale are only part of the story. Weight must also be given to socio-economic considerations (are the arrangements consistent with contemporary living in terms of work, retail and leisure patterns in society?) and political-democratic considerations (are the arrangements consistent with the idea of a “natural community” or a “perceived sense of community”?).
After all, local government does not exist solely for the delivery of local public services; it also has a democratic value as a counterpoise against centralisation. Of all the units of local government, cities are recognised as being the pre-eminent local institutions. The sense of place is at its most heightened and cities – if given sufficient power through having sizeable populations, budgets and powers – are the most effective counterweight to overbearing central governments. To conclude by paraphrasing CS Lewis, Cork is like an egg at present and it cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. It must be hatched or go bad. Dr Aodh Quinlivan is a lecturer in politics at UCC’s Department of Government, where he specialises in local government.