The review of public administration is designed to produce savings totalling up to £230m a year which, ministers say, will be diverted into front-line public services.

The changes will include:

• reducing the number of local councils from 26 to seven;
• abolition of the province’s five education and library boards and the creation of a single education authority;
• reducing to an advisory body the Catholic Council of
  Maintained Schools (CCMS), which controls Catholic-ethos schools and employs teachers;
• the replacement of four health boards and 18 health trusts with seven agencies to correspond with new council areas;
• the transfer of planning powers, control of libraries and other functions to the new, larger councils.

The present system of local government was set up in 1973 by Sir Patrick Macrory who removed many functions from councils because of accusations of discrimination, and envisaged a local assembly to oversee these functions.

The absence of such an assembly, referred to as “the Macrory gap”, led to a complex structure of boards and quangos whose members were appointed by central government rather than elected. This era will end with Tuesday’s announcements.

Belfast council will remain unchanged and in the rest of the province six super-councils, of roughly equivalent population to Belfast will be created.
In the east, there will be councils for Greater Down and Greater Antrim, and a third covering an outer ring around Belfast from Carrickfergus to Antrim and possibly Lisburn. All these councils will have natural unionist majorities.

In the west the sparser population means that the new council will cover larger geographic areas. A Greater Derry council will stretch south and west along the Donegal border taking in Strabane and Limavady; a Western council will stretch from Fermanagh to Cookstown; and a Southern council will take in Newry and Craigavon. These western councils will have an inbuilt nationalist majority.

All these new local authorities are due to be in place for elections scheduled for May 2009. Although the broad outlines are clear, a boundary commission will be set up to work out the details.

Of the major parties only Sinn Fein supported the seven-council proposal with the others preferring either 15 or 11.

Peter Weir, a DUP councillor who is president of the Northern Ireland Local Government Association (Nilga), argues that the super-councils will be too remote to respond adequately to local needs and describes the new arrangement as “a sectarian carve up”.

In order to allay fears of permanent nationalist or unionist majorities on the new councils, Northern Ireland ministers are expected to introduce measures to encourage power-sharing in all local government areas.

The other main area of contention is expected to be education. The CCMS and the Catholic hierarchy are already attempting a rearguard action to protect their right to employ teachers. However, the church authorities have not so far been supported by any of the political parties or the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, which represents most of the 8,500 teachers in Catholic-ethos schools.

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