WORK, according to Cilla Black at least, is a four letter word. And while school is out for summer, councillors, some of them anyway, are not at all happy being made to toil for a living.
Our new directly-elected Mayor John Moran is on a salary of over €150,000, but I get the impression that he is so eager to put his best foot forward for Limerick that he would probably do the job for the pure love of it. Which is well and good, of course, when you are rolling in filthy lucre.
More power to him though, Moran, a former Secretary General in the Department of Finance, has clearly worked hard for his rewards and earned every shekel.
Our new mayor has been firm but fair in his handling of the new council so far, but he is clearly a passionate and driven individual with big plans for Limerick. If anything, he is a breath of fresh air in the council chamber, and no daw either.
Nothing, they say, will work unless you do, something our new council is about to find out as a whirlwind with its sleeves rolled up rips through Merchant’s Quay.
Mayor Moran is already whipping councillors and staff into shape, and creating all kinds of ripples with it.
For many within the local authority, he has given them new purpose and spark, proving a strong leader intent on getting things done.
For others, he’s a blow-in with notions that might need taking down a peg or two.
Councillors tried this at their first full local authority meeting this month and ended up with egg on their face.
Former Mayor Kieran O’Hanlon broke into a cold sweat at the Metropolitan District’s AGM when he learned the new lord of the manor expected councillors to work during their summer holidays. He also raised concerns at this month’s full meeting as he felt Moran was cracking the whip a little too hard.
“I got the impression from the Mayor that he was rather critical of the Metropolitan area. But to put the record straight, we had our AGM and I was elected Cathaoirleach. And in the afternoon I got an email from the Mayor’s office looking for input from the Metropolitan area,” he wound up.
“Now, there’s 21 councillors. We’re not a small district out in the county … I just want you to be aware as well, councillors are not full-time in their job. They’re part-time and part-time paid.”
It’s fine, he continued, for council officials and the Mayor, who are surrounded by staff working full-time in City Hall, to be working every hour God sends. But heaven forbid councillors, who have only spent the last few months working so hard to get into the roles they’re now too underpaid and overtimed for, get any consideration at all.
None of the local representatives, he said, had yet been briefed on the mayor’s budgetary process, so were not clued into the funding available for “aspirational” wish-list projects.
“Most councillors were trying to get themselves elected the past month or so and didn’t have an opportunity, or want an opportunity maybe, to read the different candidates’ manifestos. That’s a fact.”
There’s words and there’s fighting words, and they don’t sound like either to me.
Cllr O’Hanlon said that is was “impractical” to ask Metropolitan councillors to report back so soon, saying that, when it comes to the ideas Mayor Moran spent countless of his own unpaid hours before being elected on, “it’s important that we get this right that we don’t rush it and get it wrong”.
He concluded that the Met reps were “going to meet and we will come back and we hope to cooperate fully with the mayor”.
A case of the dog ate my homework?
