FINE Gael councillor Adam Teskey had Limerick City and County Council’s Communications Department again in his sights this week after first raising questions about duplication of work back in February.
Earlier this year, Cllr Teskey asked at an Adare-Rathkeale area meeting, the rationale behind the Council having a communications officer in Active Travel, when it has a communications department consisting of experienced staff.
“I can’t get over this. It’s a duplication of work. We approved a budget there last year and it is our reserve function in terms of communication to adjudicate all the expenses of the taxpayer. And what we’re seeing is, the more staff we have, the more depleted our resources are for all the capital works,” he said at the February meeting.
This week, the Cathaoirleach of the Adare-Rathkeale Municipal District took aim at this department once again at the full monthly meeting of Limerick City and County Council (LCCC).
“What is our communications department doing? How many people have we employed in it? Are we going to keep employing the people in the communications department or are we going to scrap it, forget about it and save the taxpayers money?” Teskey asked the council executive.
He told Director General of LCCC, Dr Pat Daly that he was “alarmed, perplexed and completely annoyed” to learn that a mayoral order has been signed for international communications company M+C Saatchi to be hired for strategic and creative services at a cost of €163,480 plus vat for the forthcoming year.
“We’ve also decided to spend a further almost €100,000 to Springboard Communications. Now I want to know why we have a communications department within our local authority, when we’re spending such vast amounts of money externally and in outsourcing? Is there a need for this lavish and extraordinary expenditure?” he inquired.
In response to Cllr Teskey, Dr Daly said that more than any other local authority in the country, LCCC have a reliance and a need to manage and control its own message.
“We have learned that over the years when we were portrayed by the media as a punch bag so we consciously went out to build a very strong communications and marketing department. But we have so many needs across the organisation, not alone with the Directly Elected Mayor, but also the need on the media team to respond to questions, media requests and speech writing,” he explained.
According to Dr Daly, M+C Saatchi are managing the local authority’s brand message and working to upskill council staff for the last number of years.
“I think it is money well spent and I would be quite comfortable with the spends,” he added.
Cllr Teskey hit back that Dr Daly’s response didn’t inspire much confidence in him as a public representative.
“We should have well educated people in our communications department and they should be well able to carry out this work without having to outsource this degree in funding. This is what I would call a waste of funding,” he concluded.
