A CITY councillor is not giving up on his campaign to have the €60,000 per annum Milk Market management contract held by Limerick Chamber to be terminated. Cllr Tom Shortt has won support from other Labour colleagues, to have the market traders represented on the Trustees from 2014, when the city and county merge. ‘For the life of me I cannot see how any member of Limerick Chamber is more entitled to a seat on the Market Trustees, while a trader representing a family that has been operating in the market for generations is denied a say – traders must have equal representation to that of the high street traders represented by the Chamber from 2014 under the new legislation”.
Councillor, Tom Shortt, who is optimistic that the issue will be dealt with at the next full council meeting on Monday, April 23, believes this will succeed in bringing the Milk Market to a break-even point.
Commenting to the Limerick Post, he said that the cost-cutting measures which he had promoted with the market management committee a year ago, were now beginning to make a positive difference.
Emphatic that his recent campaign to end the €60,000 per annum management contract held by the Chamber of Commerce was justified, when the Market Trustees agreed to hold a special meeting to decide the issue, he said:
“Now after failing repeatedly over the past year to reach a decision, a majority of the Trustees have agreed that it is time to face up to the issue – I feel entirely vindicated”.
He added that another positive outcome is the decision to draw up a proper schedule of management committee meetings and quarterly meetings of the Trustees, and he welcomed the chairman, Michael Sheahan’s statement, that meetings should have been held during the last six months.
The Labour councillor said it is essential that the Market Trustees stop paying large sums of borrowed money to the Chamber.
“The failure of the Trustees recently to work through the backlog of business that had piled up due to the lack of meetings was evidence that they simply were not getting a proper return for the €60,000 per annum paid to the Chamber, and that it is an area where savings will have to be made at a time when the refurbished Milk Market has not yet broken even”.
Referring to his own experience of running a stall in the refurbished Potato Market, with his wife, in the 1980s, he said:
“It opened in a blaze of publicity but closed two years later without explanation and that made me vigilant regarding management of the Milk Market.
“The ordinary Limerick people who support the market and the hard working traders who earn their livelihoods there shouldn’t be expected to subsidise the Limerick Chamber of Commerce, and it is not the time for one of the stakeholders to be taking that amount of money out of the markets”.
