MAYOR of Limerick John Moran admitted he had hoped that work would have started more quickly at the beginning of his mayoral term, one year ago this month, in delivering for Limerick.
However, because of the scale of the new directly-elected Mayor role, and resources not being ready as quickly as he would have liked, this created an initial stumbling block, he told the Limerick Post in an exclusive interview.
“I’ve said it numerous times, but to deliver for Limerick, we need more money and more people. It’s impossible to ask an organisation that was delivering €250million worth of capital projects and needs to deliver €750m to do it with the same number of people,” Mayor Moran said.
“On the other hand, I can always get low times and say, ‘hang on a minute, we’ve now had in this year something that no local authority has ever had’. We’ve had the Taoiseach and ministers come down to Limerick. They’ve asked the mayor, ‘What do you need?’ Well, I need money, I need new people, I need new governance structures, I need a new officials meeting, not the statute.’”
The National Development Plan, the government’s five-year capital plan, has seen Limerick asked to contribute. Limerick was the only local authority asked, the Mayor is quick to point out.
“I said to the Taoiseach ‘I want to be involved in that’, officially I can anyway under the statute, but I said, ‘why don’t you trigger it? It would be more meaningful’. Within a week, all government departments had said ‘Limerick has a special privileged position, it has to be involved’,” Mayor Moran shared.
“It’s total recognition. I was sitting next to Minister Jack Chambers and was able to say to him ‘I need you for 15 minutes on the phone this week because I’m trying to map the Project Ireland board here to his infrastructure thing’. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘give me a call’. That’s access that no other local authority is getting, and is the importance in the role.”
The Mayor’s main role, he reveals, is policy, while that of Director General of Limerick City and County Council, Dr Pat Daly, is operational.
“If a lightbulb is missing, I complain about it and Pat has to fix it. I don’t have the authority to send somebody out to fix it, that works through the Director General. So all the stuff that I do on policy, whether it’s budget, housing policy, all that concern, the place in which you would expect it to be debated is the Council’s policy committees. Then the chair of each of those policy committees are then also members of the Corporate Policy Group (CPG), which effectively I chair.
“And then, the role of the Corporate Policy Group, if you read the legislation, is to give advice to the full Council on policy issues and budget. I didn’t see or inherit a CPG function like that. That realisation came to me about six months ago and I’ve spoken to other local authorities, to people involved in governance. So now we have to go back to the drawing board.”
