Real decentralisation urged by O'Malley

The failure of successive governments to decentralise has been criticised by Mr Des O'Malley, the former Progressive Democrats leader. "Dublin Castle in centuries past had less effective control than that now exercised by Upper Merrion Street," he said.

Decentralisation programmes had "only been a statistical success", he wrote in Ceide magazine, while "virtually no decision-making powers have been decentralised. Subsidiarity may be a European Union ideal. It is not an official Irish one."

While this Government was doing "some useful work" on local government reform, "no government has been prepared to grasp the nettle of financial reform for local government".

We have "pretty well no regional structures at all", he said, and this may be to our cost in divide the country into have western counties given Objective One status. Meaningful autonomous local government bodies could deal directly with Brussels, he said. "As it is, Brussels deals only with Merrion Street and Merrion Street will be very happy to keep it that way. The question should be asked, but rarely is, whether it is in the interests of all of Ireland to keep it thus."

Many councillors were privately happy their revenue-raising powers were limited, he said, but willingness to make hard decisions and be accountable for them were part of democracy.

"To act as a kind of branch office for some central authority and to be a perpetual supplicant for external funds does very little for either local democracy or effective administration of local areas. Too remote a decision-making body generates disinterest and fatalism. The depressing phenomenon of endless `deputations to Dublin' from all over the country is an unhealthy negation of what should be local and regional pride and self-confidence."

Looking to the situation beyond Dublin, Mr O'Malley said provincial cities had done moderately well in the boom, "but huge swathes of rural Ireland have not. If they continue to decline at a time such as this, what hope have they in an economic downturn under the same structures?"

What rural areas had lost in the past 25 years, he said, "has tended to be population more than income. In a sense, under the Common Agricultural Policy, we were prepared to sacrifice one for the other."

The situation was not irredeemable. The upsurge in telecommunications and information technology had partly made concepts such as peripherality and remoteness irrelevant, but outside Dublin "our greatest need is population". Physical remoteness remained a problem. The only cheap and easy place to get to from abroad was Dublin.

In trying to solve the rural problems we had to start from the premise that what is gone is gone. "Frugal comforts are no longer enough. Comely maidens want to dance somewhere other than at the crossroads," he said.