Volume 67 (2019): Issue 4 (December 2019)

The years since the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent economic crash have witnessed significant changes to the funding of the local government system in Ireland. This paper outlines these developments, while, at the same time, exploring some of the most important future challenges relating to the financing of Irish local authorities. The dominant local government revenue issues of the last decade outlined here are fiscal autonomy and the balance between own-source income and central government grants, income differences between urban and rural councils, the Local Property Tax, changes in commercial rates and fiscal equalisation. In terms of fiscal dependency and equalisation, our findings show reductions in the vertical and horizontal fiscal imbalances in the Irish local government system. Likely future challenges include the need to re-examine the balance between business taxes and non-business taxes, funding the expected growth in metropolitan areas and the financing options for capital investment by local authorities, including consideration of municipal bond issuance for the Greater Dublin Area.

This paper outlines a new approach to the development of immigrant integration policy in Ireland that is informed by an international human rights and public sector duty perspective. Based on a comprehensive review, the paper outlines the current state of immigrant integration policies in the Irish public sector, highlighting the limited awareness of this issue among public bodies. It also provides practical guidance for public bodies wishing to develop more effective immigrant integration policies, drawing from international human rights treaties and from examples of policy development in Ireland. Given the reality that Ireland is now a well-established immigrant-receiving country, the paper concludes that Ireland urgently needs a coherent and comprehensive approach to the development of immigrant integration policy. A human-rights-based approach offers such a method and would allow Ireland, through its public sector, to become a leader in immigrant integration policy development. This approach requires the elaboration of specific integration policies in order to ensure that migrant populations can practically access fundamental human rights such as housing, education, healthcare and employment.