The future of local government’s the focus of a two-day seminar which gets underway later today (Wed).
About 300 councillors from across the country will gather in Sligo this evening for the Association of Irish Local Government’s event.
AILG President is Kilkenny Councillor Pat Fitzpatrick who’s been telling KCLR News; “It’s a huge event for us as public representatives and it’s just to look at the future of local government, we have very few reserve functions and we want to see local councillors having more autonomy to do more things because at the moment central Government seems to be more centralised in Dublin and not feeding out as much into the local communities as the local politicians on the ground”.
He adds; “And that’s important for us as local public representatives that, you know, we be given the opportunities too further the aims of our constituents and all that and that it’s not as centralised and we’re just purely administrators”.
Attendees are due to discuss a range of topics, including the various areas that traditionally would have fallen under the local authority representatives which have been taken up by external bodies including Uisce Eireann and the HSE.
Cllr Fitzpatrick says they’re not the only ones; “And there’s many, many other functions, reserve functions, and now there’s even talking about development plans going to ten years and indeed the possibility of twelve years so they’re all grave concerns to the public representatives so we’re going to have a fairly honest and open conversation about the future of local government in Ireland”.
