The existing management structures for Dublin are not working well and should be replaced by a new Authority covering the Greater Dublin Area, led by a directly elected Mayor, according to David Pierce, incoming President of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce.

Speaking at the Chamber's Annual General Meeting on Thursday 5th February,  Pierce said that the rapid strides which Dublin had made in recent years were now being retarded through inaction across a number of key fronts.

"Dublin's problem is lack of leadership. We have a situation where everybody is in charge, but nobody is in overall charge. As a result, Dublin is suffering.

The city is developing in an unplanned and un co-ordinated way. There is little if any relationship between the development of transport and where people want to live. The main transport projects are not being delivered, and the concept of integrated transport is still a long way off - even if it is to ever happen.

The extension of new urban development beyond the suburbs and into adjacent counties has been marked by planning scandals - largely because there was no coherent long term plan in place.

We cannot deal with our waste management problem because everybody wants the problem shifted somewhere else."

Pierce says that Dublin needs a long term strategy to deal with key functions which currently span a number of agencies. That strategy needs to be supported by a new structure - the Greater Dublin Area Authority - led by a directly Mayor. The model parallels that of the highly successful Greater London Authority, led by Ken Livingstone and also draws on models from US cities, such as New York where Mayor Guiliani transformed the city during the 1990s.

The key functions of the Greater Dublin Area Authority should include

(a)    strategic land use and planning - setting the broad parameters for housing, road and other developments across the various counties;

(b)    transport management and planning - this would subsume the planning function of the DTO, but would also allocate resources for individual projects. It would also ensure that transport projects are integrated with land use developments. The office of Transport Regulator for Dublin Transport would form part of this function.

(c)    marketing Greater Dublin as a business location - currently, this function is not being carried out by any agency or body.

Under the Chamber's proposals, the existing local authorities in the Greater Dublin Area would remain in place and carry out existing functions, except those outlined above. Their remit should continue to be local, with their activities and services directed towards local issues such as parks, waste collection, social housing services, area based planning etc. This is the same model as London, where the Greater London Authority spans 32 local authorities across London, but where there functions do not overlap.

The Chamber proposes that Greater Dublin Area Authority should be headed by a directly elected Mayor, whose term of office should be for a four year period. By doing so, the Mayor would be given a popular mandate for the carrying out of key tasks.

More significantly, the Authority should have power to allocate budgets to allow for the carrying out of its key tasks. This would ensure that it does not become simply a co-ordinating body - the ultimate kiss-of-death for any public service organisation.