“YOU are really going to have to change your style of leadership, otherwise this will fail and it will be on your shoulders.”
These were the strong words of warning for Limerick Mayor John Moran from Fine Gael councillor Daniel Butler at last week’s adjourned mayoral fund meeting.
A former Mayor of Limerick, and Fine Gael’s candidate for last year’s mayoral election, Cllr Butler took the view that Mayor Moran makes a good civil servant but lacks political leadership experience.
He also admitted that he was less confident in the Mayor 90-minutes into last week’s heated local authority meeting than he had been prior to it.
“From the outside, it looks like we have two people behaving like two chief executives, rather than us having a mayor. That’s a big issue for me, because we don’t have a mayor, we have another civil servant,” Cllr Butler told the Mayor.
“What’s required here is meaningful leadership to be able to bring people together and that’s really what’s lacking.”
The City West representative said he felt “less empowered” as a local councillor than he did before the mayoral election.
“The role of directly-elected mayor was seen as a way of rebalancing power of central government to local government and to making local government more powerful. Power when it’s best distributed is distributed to its lowest levels, where its most connected with people. At the moment, all I’ve seen is a reallocation of power from a chief executive to a mayor who doesn’t want to share it,” Cllr Butler said.
“Our role was respected under the last Council, but that has completely vanished. I suppose the press will see it as councillors throwing a hissy fit, but what it’s really about is the people we represent being disempowered. The people of City West have been disempowered because I can’t deliver for them as I did on the previous term,” he alleged.
Cllr Butler also claimed service delivery in the Council has deteriorated over the last 18 months because staff’s time has been taken up with projects aligned to the mayoral programme. He also stated that he is receiving more complaints from his constituents regarding the lack of delivery.
“This is not working. I have no confidence that things are going to change, I really don’t believe they will. You have pointed fingers really well, but never at any point have you said ‘I got that wrong’. I’m laying responsibility at your feet,” he told Mayor Moran.
– Local Democracy Reporting Scheme