Collapse of the Council

dublin | bin tax / household tax / water tax | opinion/analysis Monday November 29, 2004 13:43 by Karen - Labour voter but ot a member

What's the plan if the Council collapses?

What is the Campaign Plan?

Tonight councilors in Dublin City will (Fingers crossed) reject the Estimates in protest at the imposition of another staggering increase in the cost of waste collection, the hated Bin Tax.

But talking to a Labour member this morning and arguing why their councilors should vote against the Charges he raised the question of what the Campaign plans to do if and when the Council collapses.

As he outlined it if the Council hasn’t passed the Estimates within the time set for it, the Government will collapse the Council and appoint a bureaucrat to run the city.

All input from elected representatives will be extinguished. This system will last until the next local elections. So for four years the city will be undemocratically run at the whim of the City Manager. No oversight, no representation from the people or anything like that.

This sounds like the nuclear option to me, but there doesn’t seem to be much thinking from Sinn Fein or the SWP or the Campaign itself about what people will do if the Council is brought down. The Labour guy I was talking to pointed out that the City Manager wants to privatize thousands of Council flats and radically cut the social housing stock and that projects like this and others will be implemented by the City bureaucracy.

Now I don’t have some sort of fetish for the Council or elected representation but I do think before the councilors and campaigners fighting to collapse the Council succeed in doing so they have a responsibility to explain what the strategy will be in the aftermath of it collapsing. I am NOT opposed to the idea of collapsing the Council, I just want to know what’s the plan if it is collapsed.