GREEN PARTY leader John Gormley’s decision to abandon plans to impose a €200 holiday home tax on mobile home owners showed “a lack of bottle”, one of his party’s councillors said yesterday.
Clare County Council member Brian Meaney, one of the few Green county councillors to survive the June elections, said holiday homes “benefit from local services; roads, lights and everything else”.
“They should make a contribution. Some of them cost as much as proper houses. The Minister should not have backed down in this way to an agenda set by Joe Duffy and Liveline. It showed a lack of bottle. He should have stood his ground and made it clear that people should pay for services that they get.”
Such holidaymakers, he said, had “no problem and no difficulty” with paying up to €1,500 a year to landowners to site their mobiles, and yet they objected to making a contribution to the local authority.
Meanwhile, local authorities have been told by the Government that their budget for this year is to be cut by over 3 per cent following budget cutbacks and the fall in car tax revenues.
Dún Laoghaire/Rathdown county councillors are to be briefed today on where they must find €7.5 million worth of cuts this year to keep their budget in line.
In letters sent in mid- to late-June, the Department of the Environment told councils the cuts to the State’s general purpose grants would be “reflected” in the payments to be made in the third-quarter of the year.
Local authorities will keep pension levies collected from their own staff, worth 7 per cent of the total wage bill, though this will be matched by a further cut in the State’s local authority grant.
“In this way the pension-related deduction has a neutral impact on local authority finances in 2009,” Department of the Environment official Laurence Kelly told city and county managers.
The €200 holiday home charge, which the Department of the Environment predicts will raise €40 million, “is a very significant development for local government, and should go some way to mitigating the above reduction”.
Falls in car taxes and general State cutbacks means, for instance, that Clare County Council’s share of the general purpose grant will fall to €14.8 million for the year, down nearly €500,000.
Meanwhile, councillors sitting on Dún Laoghaire/Rathdown’s corporate policy group will be briefed today by county manager Owen Keegan on ways of finding up to €7.5 million worth of cutbacks following preliminary contacts last week. Labour councillor Denis O’Callaghan said the cuts were likely to see some temporary staff being let go, a ban on overtime and public lighting and footpath repair cutbacks.
The picture is increasingly bleak for councils throughout the country. Galway County Council is €39 million in debt, and is adding €1 million to that bill every week.
The Galway council has said it cannot afford to invest in improvements to water treatment plants, while road maintenance will have to be “greatly scaled back”.
Meanwhile, the number of temporary staff hired by local authorities had already been sharply cut back in March compared to figures compiled in June 2007 and June 2008, according to the Minister for the Environment.
Replying to Labour TD Joanna Tuffy, Mr Gormley said Cork County Council had just 44 temporary staff on its books in March, down from 323 in June last year, and 142 the year before.
