POOR little Johnnie! Limerick’s very own Tiny Tim, Mayor John Moran, will be lucky if he gets a rock of coal from councillors this Christmas.
That’s right, the consumptive, miserable, and all-critical Ghost of Limerick Christmas Past spoke this week and it was very much a two-fingered ‘Bah humbug’ to our first citizen after a passionate speech filled with talk of brighter days ahead.
Maybe it’s that Limerick councillors like the misery, but many of them were certainly not taken in by Moran’s ‘all for one, one for all’-flavoured TED Talk. If anything, it only put their backs up further.
Moran talks a good fight and is clearly very passionate about Limerick. He’s also very polished and suave with it, but his people skills could use some tweaking. Maybe too it’s the recent newspaper reports claiming that our mayor gets more than €300,000 in yearly rent from his transatlantic property portfolio that has raised red flags for some in the chamber?
Obstacles were certainly placed in front of him on Monday when he met to discuss his mayoral vision with members of Limerick City and County Council. Backs were up before the meeting kicked off and there was a foreboding sense that this would not at all go well.
And when a special meeting was called to discuss whether the Mayor’s meeting should go ahead at all, it was obvious that Moran would be barking up a dead horse in no time. Talk about throwing a spaniel in the works!
Councillors love to talk. They’ll attend workshops until the Friesians come home, and why wouldn’t they, with cups of tea, creamy scones, and dainty triangle-shaped sandwiches on tap.
Before Mayor Moran could deliver his ‘we are the world’ eulogy, councillors were already chomping at the bit for more workshops.
You can be sure that if Limerick councillors took over Nakatomi Tower, their only demands would be oodles of workshops and dainty triangle-shaped sandwiches. John McClane would need a PowerPoint presentation and not a Beretta pistol to keep these rowdy pothole politicians in order.
Christmas came early for Cllr Stephen Keary who was already talking about Santa at Monday’s meeting, declaring that “with no costings done, this is more like a wishlist for little Johnnie for Christmas from Santy, with all due respect, Mayor”.
Fellow Fine Gael Adare-Rathkeale representative Adam Teskey was Christmas hamming it up too, right to the top of the Christmas tree in a performance that would make the great Kevin Sheahan blush.
“We can have all the wishlists we like, but this all boils down to costs,” he gesticulated.
“I do know from my eight or nine years’ being on Limerick City and County Council that when the Directors of Service come in front of us it’s all cost based and cost related. And while we’re saying ‘Limerick is this’ and ‘Limerick is that’, we don’t have a bad Limerick at all at the moment.”
Cllr Teskey contested that he would be “doing a disservice” to the people that elected him “if I was to have any hand in this plan”.
“We had a government that brought in the Troika. We had a government that ran the economy into ruination. And yes, you were appointed by the then Minister (Finance Minister Michael Noonan) to come in and clean up the mess. And yes, you are here because of the present government in terms of legislation that was put before them. But by God almighty, we’re not going to follow the previous mistakes of the past by putting together a plan that has no cost associated with it.”
Yippee-ki-yay indeed!
