An Act to provide for the transfer of part of the administrative area of the council of the county of Cork to the administrative area of the council of the city of Cork; to provide for the holding of plebiscites by certain local authorities on the question as to whether or not the cathaoirligh of those local authorities should be elected to such positions by the electors of the administrative areas of those local authorities and the question as to whether or not certain functions of the chief executives of those local authorities should be transferred to those cathaoirligh; for those and other purposes to amend the Local Government Act 1991, the Local Government Act 2001, the Valuation Act 2001, the Official Languages Act 2003 and certain other enactments; and to provide for matters connected therewith.
Local authority boundary change; directly-elected mayor
The Local Government Act 2019 (
Act No.1 of 2019; previously the Local Government Bill 2018,
Bill No. 91 of 2018) is an
Act of the Oireachtas (Irish parliament) which provided for the following:
The provision of
plebiscites, which were held alongside the May 2019 local elections, to approve the principle of
directly electedmayors for Cork City Council,
Limerick City and County Council, and
Waterford City and County Council, rejected in Cork and Waterford and only passed in Limerick. The
proposed directly elected mayor for the Dublin metropolitan area was excluded from the act because of the greater complexity of the debate across four local government areas, with
Fingal County Council having opposed previous proposals. Galway was also excluded because of the ongoing plans to merge
Galway City Council and
Galway County Council. On 2 April 2019 the government published more detailed proposals, agreed at the 20 March 2019 cabinet meeting, for the plebiscites and, for those passed, holding mayoral elections and granting powers to mayors. On 11 April 2019 the Dáil approved draft regulations for the plebiscites to take place.[1] The
Referendum Commission was not responsible for the plebiscites.
References
Sources
Watters, Niall; Buckley, Roni; Keyes, Finn (16 October 2018).
"Bill Digest: Local Government Bill 2018"(PDF). Oireachtas Library & Research Service. Retrieved 14 April 2019.