Address to the Seanad Public Consultation Committee
- Pádraig McEvoy
- Apr 25, 2024
- 9 min read
Updated: May 12, 2024
Thursday, 25 April 2024
From 1:30 pm today, on behalf of the Eastern and Midland Regional Assembly, Northern & Western Regional Assembly, and the Southern Regional Assembly, I will briefly highlight the key contributions of Ireland's three Regional Assemblies to the Seanad Public Consultation Committee of the Future of Local Democracy and Local Government [link].
Regional Assemblies coordinate across local authority boundaries in the areas of strategic policies for spatial planning and managing over €1 bn of EU Commission Regional Cohesion Funding, EU Just Transition Funding and other programmes.
Each constituent local authority nominates locally elected members, who form the closest level of government to the citizens, to oversee and make decisions through the statutory functions of a regional assembly. RAs govern with the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality.
Regional Spatial and Economic Strategies frame coherent planning and environmentally sustainable economic development for societal benefits, ensuring consistency with national programmes, plans, policies, proposals, and objectives the government sets.
Reflecting on the nine years since RA's establishment, there are opportunities for reform. Participation in today's debate is about alerting Seanad Éireann, including some former members, of the role and impact of regional assemblies on whole-of-government coordination for citizens.
To download further information on coordinating whole-of-government policies for spatial and sustainable economic development, Senior Planner and Assistant Director of the Southern Assembly, Kevin Lynch, has published this [pdf download [link] explainer.
Record of the Debate [link]
Mr. Pádraig McEvoy:
I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak to the members. I am here in a substitute role on behalf of some of the other members of the association. Three regional assemblies form the Association of Irish Regions. They are the Eastern and Midland Regional Assembly, the Northern and Western Regional Assembly and the Southern Regional Assembly. Established under the Local Government Reform Act 2014, the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality govern the exercise of regional assemblies’ competences. Each constituent local authority nominates locally elected members, who are closest to the citizens, to oversee and make decisions through the statutory functions of each regional assembly. Local authorities provide the core funding for the assemblies, whose combined employees are limited to around 80.
Regional assemblies are statutorily mandated to co-ordinate strategic policy between local authorities to support coherent spatial planning and environmentally sustainable economic development for societal benefits, ensuring consistency with national programmes, plans, policies, proposals and objectives set by the Government.
In collaboration with local authorities, regional assemblies formulate, adopt, implement and monitor regional spatial and economic strategies and five metropolitan area strategic plans. Centred on Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick-Shannon and Waterford, these MASP policy documents extend to include adjoining local authorities. Each regional spatial and economic strategy assists public bodies, Departments, State agencies and local authorities with the collaborative delivery of democratically approved strategic objectives in the RSES and MASP documents.
The regional assemblies play instrumental roles in delivering EU policy in Ireland. They manage the delivery of regional operational programmes and participate in European territorial co-operation programmes and EU regional projects. They facilitate and assist local authorities in collaborating with EU institutions on regional and local development matters and support the national delegation to the Committee of the Regions, as Mr. Murphy mentioned. The assemblies manage in excess of €1 billion of EU funding in Ireland so they make a significant contribution.
Each assembly contributes a statutory role in the development plan and local economic and community plan process and adopts implementation strategies, assisted by EU project partnerships and funding. These develop capacities across local authorities, the third-level education sector and other public bodies for successful implementation.
While regional assemblies aim to create transformative change within the national policy framework, they are limited by structural challenges. Structural linkages from regional assemblies to the national level are ad hoc, diffuse and weak. Regional assemblies are circumvented in strategic planning matters such as population targets and housing needs assessments. Project Ireland 2040 funding mechanisms and strategic investment decisions remain highly centralised. Ireland’s regional governance is characterised by weak autonomy and a lack of devolved funding powers, unlike competing EU regions that benefit from multi-annual funding programmes at sub-national levels. This is particularly apparent for metropolitan areas with significant growth targets and challenges but no statutory regional coordination mechanisms for delivering funding. Local authorities fund the regional assemblies and nominate elected members who do not have a stated regional or geographic mandate. Tensions between local and regional roles can arise and limit incentives for elected members to provide more leadership to address challenging issues, such as climate change, rapid population expansion and better-balanced regional development. A multiplicity of regional public bodies, some with related or overlapping roles and varying administrative geographies, can obscure the mandates of regional assemblies, leaving people uncertain about their functions and so forth. With contributions to strategic planning and EU funding in Ireland since 2015, the recruitment and influence of leading employees in regional assemblies depend on aligning posts with equivalent conditions across local government, the Civil Service and public bodies.
Regional assemblies in Ireland play an important role despite having fewer devolved competences than and a different electoral mandate from their EU counterparts. Reform should enhance regional performance by integrating planning with the resource management that affects the regions. Regional assemblies should be given direct responsibility and greater visibility towards achieving national objectives. We ask that any implementation review the committee might recommend be comprehensive in its examination of the local government process, encompassing both empowerment and responsibility at local and regional levels.
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Senator Mark Wall:
We are all talking about the planning Bill that is coming through here fairly quickly. We are all looking forward to it, even the Cathaoirleach. What has the planning Bill in store for regional assemblies and where is it going? The other aspect I am concerned about is centralisation and the one-size-fits notion in relation to regional assemblies, that everything is going to be the same everywhere. That is not the case with regional assemblies. I would like a few comments on that.
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Senator Joe O’Reilly:
I find Councillor McEvoy’s situation fascinating because, to be truthful, if a regional authority gets powers, does that not by definition erode the powers of the county councils? It is a very difficult one to manipulate and I would be fascinated by his response to it.
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Senator Shane Cassells:
The point Councillor McEvoy made was very interesting. In previous sessions, we have discussed where we would have the importance of regional assemblies as part of this process, and that is going to be really important in the context of whether, as a society, we take them seriously, and there is also the set of devolved statutory powers. We see in the context of European elections that there are huge swathes of constituencies where there is buy-in from the public for these massive constituencies, but given our country’s small nature, they are important. I really welcome Councillor McEvoy’s contribution and it will form part of our discussions.
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Mr. Kevin Lynch:
I come at this as a senior planner and assistant director with the Southern Regional Assembly with more than 30 years’ experience as an official working in local government and the regional sector. I would like to frame the discussion in respect of where Ireland will be in 20, 30 or 40 years. Let us take some of the key challenges we will face. We will have well over 1 million additional people the next 20 years. Half of those will be part of a natural increase and the other half will be the result of migration. We have massive climate change issues and transportation issue, etc. Ireland needs to transform itself in the next 20 years. The question is whether the current structures to achieve that are fit for purpose. The diminution of local government in the past might have been seen as dealing with awkward questions or difficult issues past and it was seen as avoiding those.
There are a number of factors when looking at it from the regional assembly perspective. First, in policy terms, Ireland has a good overall national policy in the national planning framework. There might be questions over it but it sets out a strategy for the next 20 years but the question is: how is it best delivered? Are the structures there to deliver that properly? The diminution of local government and the role of the councillor within that seriously hinders that development. In my view as an official, the elected members are key to this. It is not just that they hold the officials and government to account but that they provide leadership in facing difficult issues, and Ireland will continue to face difficult issues as we transform. That needs elected members to give that leadership. In my experience, and what I have seen happen, is there is no incentive for a councillor to do that given that the role is largely reduced to lobbying or whatever. Empowerment is structurally important for the country. It needs elected members to play a very important role in that. The national planning framework talks about balanced regional growth. When I say balanced regional growth, that is the entire country, Dublin and the rest of the State as well. That needs to have proper funding brought to the regional and local levels to deliver that. If we follow where the funding goes in fact, it does not follow the policy. I would prefer to see a structure where local governments are empowered with ten-year plans to implement government policy and that would result in far better delivery of that policy. The overly centralised nature of our structures is not efficient in the job that has been given and it does not deliver. Local empowerment is needed to better deliver at regional and local levels.
On the role of the regional assemblies in the context of the local authority system, I do not see any contradiction. The regional level should fulfil its purpose at the regional level. It does not need to be involved in all the areas that are properly the role of the local level. What that means is overall strategic issues or dealing with issues that are cross-boundary or in metropolitan areas where there is grouping needed. There is no need for regional bodies to get involved in every area of work.
Finally, on the Planning Bill, there is a lot of good there in relation to regional functions, but the critical role of regional assemblies is in monitoring the implementation of the national planning framework. A worrying development there is that as part of that process, public bodies and others are required to input the regional assemblies on that as well as local authorities and it is proposed to take that out. That reduces our key connection between the national and local levels and that is very worrying.
Mr. Pádraig McEvoy:
To answer the other question, one-size-fits-all was mentioned. That is a phrase that is used at European level about the ERDF funding. The Committee of the Regions - Michael Murphy has moved on there - but it registered or submitted a key concern to its environment that the European Union would be drawing back from involving decision-making on that €1 billion worth of funding that we talked about in Ireland that would go back to a central location in the State rather than be participative in the regions.
There is a lot of technical language in the planning policy at strategic level. If it could be summarised, once one goes past a county boundary, there is collaborative gain by two, three or more counties working together to site something or invest in something that is to the mutual benefit of all in a district beyond their own county. The regions create the forum in which that can happen but within the national planning framework. Some people are concerned, and maybe legitimately, that the regions might be overly centralising and aspect. While there is a hierarchy of policy - national, regional, county - in reality once the policy is created, the regions sit at the same level as the local authorities. They simply require decision-making and funding to follow a co-ordinated agreement between the local authorities. By having the local authorities participate in the creation of the policy, there is the equity and possibility for the balanced regional development that Mr. Lynch spoke of. Recent data from the census shows that growth has happened in all the subregions, known as strategic policy areas, SPAs, but the growth has been higher than expected in some and lower in others but then what happens if the funding is not earmarked in a way to deliver on the long-term objectives? Some areas of the country such as Fingal, Limerick, Wicklow, Stillorgan, north Kildare are not keeping pace with school delivery. There are three regional offices doing schools designs but that might not be enough. There is not enough parallel collaborative co-operation in the delivery of that type of infrastructure. I am not suggesting that goes back into the regional assemblies but I am describing having that partnership at the regional level to advocate for the local level, which ensures that those at the central level are not simply solving a small problem but are thinking of everybody.
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