Councils were kindergartens of corruption. Reform must be swift and brutal

YOU might, in the wake of tribunal conclusions on three former taoisigh — Bertie Ahern, Charles Haughey and Albert Reynolds — believe politics needs to be reformed from the top down.

But, having heard revelations yesterday from former Fine Gael Dublin city councillor Mary Muldoon, it appears the opposite is true. Politics needs reform from the bottom up.

On Raidió na Gaeltachta’s Glór Anoir programme, she claimed that ‘less than twothirds but more than 50 per cent’ of her council colleagues were taking bribes disguised as political donations.

Presumably, these were in return for favourable planning decisions — and what is heartbreaking is the relatively small amounts i nvolved. For anywhere between IR£ 500 and IR£2,500, it seems, communities could be blighted with u n wanted office blocks, unneeded shopping centres and unsuitable estates on which families now are trapped, tens of kilometres away from their workplaces and the support network of parents and siblings they once enjoyed.

Shysters

And what her comments prove is what we long suspected, that far from being civic- minded chambers with the good of the community at heart, town and city councils instead were the kindergartens of corruption, the proving ground for shysters and chancers, some of whom moved into the big league at a national level.

Last week’s Mahon report found that five Dublin councillors received corrupt payments — Fianna Fáil’s Tony Fox, Colm Mcgrath, Don Lydon and GV Wright, and Fine Gael’s Tom Hand.

It also found that ‘inappropriate’ payments had been received by Fine Gael councillors Anne Devitt, Olivia Mitchell and Therese Ridge.

Mr Wright later became both a senator and a TD but retired in 2007. Mr Lydon and Miss Ridge served as senators and Miss Mitchell is a serving TD.

But the general atmosphere of low-level corruption that Mary Muldoon described is not the only downside of our l ocal councils. They also foster the disease of clientelism, the favour for the constituent, the wily stroke that ensures councillors are re-elected.

There are few of us of a certain age who do not know how this worked because it was endemic.

If your granny couldn’t get a medical card or renovations on her flat, you went to the councillor you knew personally, or the one from the party you openly supported.

If a protected tree was blocking the sunlight in your back garden, it could be made to magically develop some disease — Dutch elm was a godsend back in the day — and chopped down. If Johnny or Mary needed a job as a civil servant, a good word could be put in.

Some councillors’ clinics were l i ke Don Corleone’s private study on his daughter’s wedding day, as they welcomed a trail of supplicants queuing to seek favourable outcomes to their petty bureaucratic squabbles.

So if we, as voters, believed we could abuse the system in this way, making personal petitions based on friendships or party loyalties, it seems a very small leap of imagination for developers to believe they could do so, too, and f or councillors to believe the rules were flexible. We, after all, expected flexibility from them.

And so our councils became i ntercessors, f e e di ng our requests up the food chain. Whoever said that knowing people in high places was an advantage knew nothing about Irish politics.

People in high places have little need to curry favour with anyone, but people in low places who are desperate to move up the ladder will do anything to make it happen.

When the plan worked and councillors found themselves elected to the Dáil — the ultimate ambition of anyone who enters political life — the petitioners simply f ollowed them, expecting their trivial concerns to somehow occupy the valuable time of those who were now charged with forming national policies.

Before the dual mandate was abolished, there were many TDS who also remained councillors, a state of affairs so laughable it is astonishing we tolerated it for so long. Don’t forget that Bertie Ahern, as a Dublin city councillor, was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1986, even though he had been a TD for nine years at that stage. Nor was he the only TD to serve as mayor.

What that showed was the reluctance of national politicians to sever ties with the grassroots. Old habits did not die hard because they didn’t die at all.

For others, the goal may have been a great deal simpler — personal enrichment. After all, Colm Mcgrath was dubbed ‘Mr Insatiable’ by lobbyist Frank Dunlop because of the level of payments he requested.

And yet who among us can say unequivocally that the odd 500 quid here and there would not have made l i fe easier if we too had been elected to a council?

Thankless

It is, in many ways, a thankless job. If you have never been to a council meeting, your life remains absolutely fulfilled. If you have, you will know how tedious they are and how the whip system militates against vision and originality.

Before we dotted the country with glass and chrome palaces, a Victorian council chamber on a wet and cold November night was a useful foretaste of hell.

Working for expenses and no salaries, councillors are expected to be at the beck and call of their constituents. Many have businesses to run as well, or taxing jobs that allow for little leeway when it comes to consideration of local issues.

How much easier it must have been to be told how to vote — and then to get paid for it.

So how can we change things? With difficulty. Mahon dealt solely with Dublin issues but Environment Minister Phil Hogan has shut down inquiries into planning procedures at five other councils — including in Carlow, in his home constituency — so we may never know the extent of payola and corruption that blighted the country.

But if we take Mary Muldoon’s e x per i e nce a nd a ppl y it nationally, we have to assume that there are, in many councils, people serving us who at some stage in their lives took either corrupt bribes or ‘ i rregular’ payments.

That’s why reform must be swift and brutal. Already, we know that various councils, among them Waterford city and county and Tipperary north and south, are to merge — but this is not nearly enough.

Excess

We have 1,627 councillors in Ireland, way in excess of what is needed. If it takes that number of part- timers to run l ocal authorities, imagine how many fewer we would need if they were working full-time.

That’s why we should condense councils into regional authorities and then, to attract people of calibre and to protect against temptation, we may just have to bite the bullet and pay them, just as we pay TDS.

Three hundred councillors at €40,000 a year each would cost €12million. It would take a full 25 years for the payroll to match the total cost of the Mahon Tribunal, which was necessary only because it had to unravel the venality of politicians in the past. With labour law and disciplinary procedures in i ts arsenal, a supercouncil could much more easily expel the corrupt.

After that, it would be down to us. We have to accept that councils are there to benefit the needs of the community and not partisan self- i nterest. That mindset, sadly, may be much more difficult to modify than the behaviour of the people who turned a noble calling into a grubby life, one with the hand held out waiting for the next brown envelope to drop.