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Anger management

Written by Eoin Weldon

Thursday, 16 June 2011

Monday night’s meeting of Cork City Council descended into a farce after councillors disrupted the meeting, confronted each other and shouted obscenities. In what long-standing Cllr John Kelleher (Labour) described as the worst he had seen in 28 years, chaos ensued as a number of councillors shouted over each other incessantly for over half an hour.

'Sneaky'
The trouble started when Socialist Party Cllr Mick Barry accused City Manager Tim Lucey of being “extremely sneaky” in initiating the upgrade of the city’s water treatment plant on the Lee Road privately rather than publicly. The Department of the Environment has stated that in order for the waterworks to be upgraded, the preferred option is for it to be constructed and operated by the private sector. In doing so the Department will provide a discount of €18 million from the €25 million cost of the works, if the work is to be pursued publicly then the entire cost would have to be borne by the Council. Cllr Barry protested at the decision being made without the consent of the councillors and refused to sit down until there was further discussion.

Lord Mayor Cllr Michael O’Connell had earlier left the meeting to attend other business and Deputy Lord Mayor Denis O’Flynn chaired the remainder of the meeting. As Cllr O’Flynn tried to continue with the agenda, Cllr Barry persisted and proceeded to talk over other councillors. Eventually the Deputy Lord Mayor adjourned the meeting for ten minutes in an attempt to let things settle. However, on the resumption Cllr Barry continued to disrupt the meeting and other councillors began to lose patience.

Fine Gael Cllr Joe O’Callaghan started to shout at Cllr Barry to “shut up and sit down” he also shouted “sit down you gobshite”, Sinn Féín Cllr Chris O’Leary took issue with this and when he turned to Cllr O’Callaghan a heated verbal exchange ensued. Cllr O’Leary accused the Fine Gael councillor of telling him to “f*** off”, which Cllr O’Callaghan denied. Sinn Féin Cllr Mick Nugent then weighed in, standing up to confront Cllr O’Callaghan, grabbing a paper cup from his desk and asking had he been in the pub earlier.

Restrained
Both councillors were restrained by colleagues as Cllr Barry continued to shout at the other side of the chamber. Cllr O’Flynn then asked Cllr Barry to leave the meeting, which he did after another outburst at the City Manager. As Cllr Barry left the chamber he was branded a “disgrace” by members from a number of parties. A clearly agitated Cllr John Kelleher expressed his shock at the behaviour of Cllr Barry: “I have been here 28 years and this is the worst I have ever seen. He showed disrespect to the City Manager and the Deputy Lord Mayor. Sinn Féín Cllr Henry Cremin suggested all councillors should seek professional help: “Some comments here tonight made the hairs at the back of my neck stand up. All councillors should be sent on anger management courses, I’m deadly serious. I was really surprised by what I saw tonight.”

Cllr Barry remains unrepentant and says he will continue to protest at any attempts to privatise council services: “This is an agenda which will end up with profiteers charging ordinary people massive sums for services that were once publicly-owned and funded through the tax system. It is an agenda that council staff and the trade union movement should resist," he said.

Comments (1) »

Water Privatisation
written by Rose Brien Harrington, June 16, 2011

I quite agree with Councillor Mick Barry on this issue. We had all this before when the NCT was franchised out to some company in France. The result was that the company didn't care one iota about road safety however they did put up the cost of a test and tightened the criteria to a ridiculous degree resulting in retests being ordered for trivial reasons such as figures/letters being the wrong height on registration plates. Furthermore I know of two taxi drivers whose vehicles failed an emissions test because the engine had been heated up too much, when the test was repeated and done properly the vehicles passed. This is the sort of thing that will happen with the water service if it's privatised.

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