Meath in Louth and now Cavan/Monaghan!

Dear Sir,

North Meath, Drumconrath, Part of Lobinstown, Meath Hill, Kilmainimwood, Carrickcleck will move into the Dáil Constituencies of Cavan/Monaghan according to the government constituency report.

Here I outline why Irish Dáil Constituencies should be aligned with County Council areas and why I will be opposing this proposal.

In a good democratic system, one’s regional government (county councils) deals with county/ regional issues, and they elect national politicians (TDs) to deal with national issues and legislation. Therefore, it shouldn’t matter what county a TD comes from.

Sadly, the Irish system isn’t that efficient in practice. We tend to elect our national politicians (TDs) based on local issues, and they add to this by spending more of their time in Leinster House lobbying for county issues than proposing and debating national legislation, which in turn would benefit the State and in turn all counties including their own (if you think I’m wrong, think about all your Local TDs and what their views on national policies are, and you may find yourself struggling).

Sadly, in in this current “parish pump” style of national politics, County Meath has been losing out rather badly.

As a county, we rank very low on many tables, (lowest number of Council staff by head in the county thus poorer quality roads; 2nd lowest number of An Garda Síochána members by head of population in the country; one of the lowest HSE spends by head of population in the country) and sadly one factor playing to this in the last number of years is that Meath has been short one TD since part of the county was added into the Louth constituency to make it a 5 TD seat area.

And, to be straight, the priority of the 5 TDs is to get services for Louth, as any increase they get for the Meath part is divided by 12 across the entire county of Meath.

Cutting another chunk of Meath and placing it into Cavan-Monaghan will weaken Meath’s lobbying power for services even further, thus until a day when we have a better system of national governance this alteration should be opposed not only by North Meath folk but by everyone in this county including North and South.

Personally, I would love to see the number of TDs in Ireland cut to approximately 41 and thus TDs would cover three or four counties and in turn we would have a higher level of TD elected on national issues similar to our MEPs from all parties, but sadly that isn’t on the table today; only this broken system is, and with it we must oppose it, as it is a poor proposal.

Yours, Cllr Paddy Meade