Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore has called for the legal voting age in local government elections to be lowered to 16 to encourage participation in the democratic process at local level.
Outlining a range of proposals for what he said was radical reform of local government, Mr Gilmore also said the role of county manager should be abolished.
Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore
Speaking today at the George Newsome commemoration seminar in Bray, Co Wicklow, the Labour leader said he wanted to see better, more innovatvie local democracy such as neighbourhood forums that feed into local decision making.
Mr Gilmore said two levels of local government were needed - regional authorities, which would include city authorities for the larger cities, and local authorities, which would include county, town and district Councils.
He also called for "local referendums" on certain issues and said that fair representation must be achieved through a fairer distribution of councillors.
Mr Gilmore said there were "widespread inequalities" in council representation around the country.
"For example, Fingal has one councillor for every 10,000 inhabitants, while Leitrim has one councillor to every 1,316 inhabitants. In Kilkenny that figure is 1 for 3,368, while in Kildare it is 1 for 7,453."
"This clearly points to the need to increase representation at council level in major urban areas and the commuter belts.
"However, equalization of local government representation should not be achieved by reducing levels of representation in areas of the country where density of population is low."
Mr Gilmore said Minister for the Environment John Gormley's "modest proposals" for local government reform "do not go far enough".
"They lack vision and they lack ambition. The Minister's Green Paper proposes only to look at the absolute minimum reforms that are urgently needed to make local government effective and accountable."
He said Labour's proposals for the reform of local government are aimed at strengthening local democracy, making local government and the providers of public services more accountable to local people, and providing for "joined-up planning and clever governance at every level".
Other measures for reform proposed by the Labour leader include what he called "real decentralisation of power, to bring the delivery and management of public services closer to the people who use them".
"It not only makes more sense that the local authority, rather than the Department of Education, would be responsible for maintaining local school buildings, but local governance structures would also allow for the efficient coordination of different services."
Mr Gilmore said the county manager role should be replaced by one of a chief executive of the council. This person would have an advisory role, but all policy decisions made by the council would be those of democratically elected councillors.
The Labour leader said elected councillors should also have the power to question, in public, any provider of a public service in their area about aspects of their service.