Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)

I will be brief, as I appreciate that the Seanad needs to conduct its business.

I am willing to take back with me this discussion – Deputy Ó Murchú was right when he said there was considerable agreement – and the report, when it is published, and feed them into our party’s manifesto process. I have no doubt that I will be supported by my Seanad party colleagues.

There is a growing call for increasing the powers of local authority members. That is important, but with power comes the responsibility to make decisions, which was Senator Higgins’s point. This is about how we organise ourselves and make decisions.

I would have to push back a little against the suggestions of using D’Hondt and of everyone getting a turn in cathaoirleach position and so on.

This is not some sort of rotation of a privilege, it is the responsibility to pass a budget in a chamber. It is a responsibility to make the difficult decisions. One of the biggest things I find among retiring local authority members is the frustration that the council chamber is a debating chamber and not a decision-making chamber. To give a very brief example, in this debate, the majority of the parties that won the majority of the support in the Dáil received an 18-minute while the Opposition received a 48-minute allocation. That is nothing unusual to the Cathaoirleach. It happens every day in chambers right around the country and it happens every day in the Dáil as well. With increasing powers comes the responsibility to make decisions and that often involves people coming together, whether they are in a party or not, or are an independent or in a technical group or whatever. If involves making difficult decisions and that is the corollary to increasing the powers we have. The biggest example of that is that we all agree the city and county managers have too much power. Every councillor in every local authority around the country now has the ability to strip their chief executive of the powers and to invest them in a directly-elected person. One might not agree with that system but it is a far better system than the current one. Every single councillor in every local authority now has that power to trigger a plebiscite. The question is whether people will be willing to take that responsibility and go for it.