We all know our local government system is very under-powered. But there is less clarity about the reasons for this - apart from an impression that the deep-seated reluctance at both political and civil service level to concede effective powers to councils reflects a simple power-hunger by central government.
But the matter is more complicated than this. There is a long and quite complex background to the process of centralising power within the Irish system - which is traced with authority and skill by Mary Daly in her remarkable history of Irish local government, published last year.*
Democratically-elected county councils had been introduced to Ireland in 1898 by a Conservative government hoping thus to stave off the demand for Home Rule. Despite this unpropitious background, these county councils found a fair measure of public acceptance - perhaps partly because the counties were established local government units, and had recently been given a new role in the public mind through the GAA.
Three-quarters of the council seats were immediately won by nationalists, and during the following two decades the councils were dominated by the Irish Parliamentary Party. Unfortunately, clientilism, jobbery, and in cases actual corruption, became features of the system - as indeed had been the case with the earlier-established urban authorities in the 19th century.
Moreover in the Ulster counties, jobs were awarded by local authorities on a religious basis. Catholics were totally excluded from employment by many unionist
dominated local authorities, while in other areas all appointments in the power of the council went to Catholics.
The Local Government Board, whose task it was to supervise the system, failed adequately to control these abuses - possibly because, as an appointed agency of the British government, it had doubts about the wisdom of a head-on collision with democratically-elected bodies.
However, the revolutionary leaders of Irish separatism in Sinn F ein were not so inhibited, and were vocally critical of the performance of councils dominated by their rivals in the Irish Party.
The 1920 local elections gave Sinn Fein control of all but five county councils, as well as of the great majority of urban authorities. These county councils immediately gave allegiance to the Dail government - but the ensuing collapse in their finances led many to contemplate or to engage in compromise with the British-appointed Local Government Board, thus bringing them into conflict with the the Dail's Department of Local Government, headed by W.T. Cosgrave and his Assistant Minister, Kevin O'Higgins.
Even Sinn Fein members of a council like Galway found it difficult to accept the view vigorously conveyed to them by Kevin O'Higgins that "it would be better a thousand times for the Irish Nation that there should be a financial breakdown here and there amongst the public bodies than that there should the moral collapse of a surrender to enemy regulations".
These pre-Truce tensions influenced the attitude of our first government to local councils. As soon as the Civil War ended that government moved rapidly to abolish the 214 rural district councils which had been established in 1898.
These sub-county units had never caught on, partly because the rural council areas had been arbitrarily delineated and failed to command any local loyalty - as might have happened had they been based on the pre-existing sub-county units - the ancient baronies.
During the War of Independence these rural district councils, as well as the boards of guardians that were responsible for public health and the administration of the Poor Law, had been seen by the D ail Government as "uneconomic and disloyal".
Indeed, the Minister introducing the Bill for their abolition described them to the Dail as: "obsolete, uneconomic, inefficient, an anomaly and a foreign imposition. . . with roots neither in Irish history nor in the Irish character"!
Simultaneously, fresh tensions arose between the new government and the county and county borough (i.e. city) councils. Some of these tensions centred on public appointments.
At local as also at national level there was resentment amongst pro-Treaty politicians at the refusal of the new government to give jobs to former members of the Volunteers at the expense of the principle of appointment on merit. As Mary Daly dryly remarks: "many government supporters underestimated its commitment to a nonpartisan recruitment process". Many local tax officers appointed by the councils were found to be "practically illiterate" and incapable of keeping accounts - and there was also an element of bribery of council members by applicants. For one dispensary doctor post, bribes equivalent to £35,000 in today's money were reportedly offered.
Accordingly, in 1926 a Local Appointments Commission was established to ensure appointments to many posts would be made on merit - although the perhaps inevitable exclusion of manual and of some temporary positions from the Commission's ambit enabled jobbery to survive at that level - although in these cases bribery was unlikely to prove a problem.
Meanwhile, Dublin and Cork Corporations were dissolved - and later restored, albeit with many of their powers vested in newly-appointed city managers. Four county councils were also dissolved (one of them twice!), mainly because of threats of insolvency arising from rates arrears.
And a further 24 subordinate local authorities were dissolved, generally because of incompetence or dishonesty that had been allowed to develop during the period of British rule, when the Local Government Board had been unwilling to intervene in the affairs of democratically-elected bodies.
Among these bodies was the Roscommon Town Commission, three of whose members, including the chairman, together with its secretary and assistant secretary, all happened to be employed by a local newspaper.
The commissioners had built artisans' dwellings with borrowed public funds and had then let them to some of their own number and to other newspaper employees, at rents that were so low that the loan repayments fell into arrears - which is presumably the reason the affair came to light.
Fianna Fail, in power after 1932, faced similar problems with local authorities, and took similar action. During its first 10 years it had to dissolve six county councils, and in 1940 it extended to the other cities and to all the counties the city management system that Cumann na nGaedheal had earlier introduced in Cork and Dublin.
The enactment of the physical planning legislation in 1963 gave additional powers to local authorities which were subsequently used by a number of councils, through the use of Section 4 procedures, to enable individuals to override planning provisions designed to preserve the environment.
There was not sufficient public concern about the preservation of the environment to deter local representatives from such interventions for fear of losing the votes of the electors whose environment was thus being damaged. In the absence of such a community reaction the deeply-embedded clientelism of Irish politics led councillors to back individual demands to override planning controls.
Another problem created by the powers that local councils exercise under the planning laws has been the temptation to succumb to pressure from land-owners and developers to zone agricultural land for development purposes, whether or not such zoning is in the public interest, and whether or not there is provision for it being serviced.
The exercise of this power has always had the capacity to lead to a reintroduction of bribery into the local government system - from which at an early stage in the history of our State it had been effectively excluded by the removal from these bodies of powers of appointment to remunerative positions, and by strict control of tendering for public contracts. A consequence of this extension of the powers of local authorities has been the perceived need to establish the Flood Tribunal.
My own experience has led me to believe that, contrary to popular belief, our failure to address seriously the need to devolve authority to local bodies lies more in successive governments' still-remembered unhappy experiences of past local authority behaviour than in an active desire by central government to retain power for its own sake.
I believe that a general reluctance among politicians to voice these concerns for fear of opening old wounds has prevented serious discussion of how we could set about safely devolving substantial powers to local level.
The absence of such debate because of this kind of over-sensitivity may be almost as much of a deterrent to progress towards this goal as the failure of central government to face squarely the issue of local taxation to finance local activities. This is why it has seemed to me desirable at this point to air these aspects of our local government history.
*The Buffer State: The History Of The Roots Of The Department of the Environment. Prof Mary E. Daly, Institute of Public Administration 1997.