DID you hear the one about councillors railing against Perspex windows in Merchant’s Quay? They don’t want transparency in the workplace.
Local representatives are a very shy lot really and don’t want to be getting stage fright in front of the electorate. On the other hand, once they get warmed up, there’s no stopping them when there’s a live audience.
One thing is crystal clear though, recording Council meetings for public viewing will only see more chewing-the-scenery amateur theatrics than we are used to at present. Won’t someone please think of the longsuffering local hacks? We won’t see our families for days!
Seriously though, if there’s no pane there’s no gain, but all this talk of recording all live-streamed local authority shindigs is no more than a smokescreen. If the Mayor, Council members and the executive could go about their business in the chamber as grown-ups, there would be no need for a steamy window show.
As one Fine Gael man posted after word of the International Rugby Experience building set to become a national women’s museum – “no negativity, just delivery”. Now you’re talking!
Council meetings have been about as transparent as molasses since the amalgamation of city and county councils. The real business is conducted behind closed doors these days at workshops, briefings, and whatever you are having yourself. Only when the chinks are ironed out of the armour does the important business ever make it in front of a public gallery when it’s all ready to be signed, sealed, and delivered without a cross word to be heard from anyone.
Rather than putting up recordings of the niceties in the chamber for hours on end, while Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael wrestle it out with the Mayor in the backroom, keep the business at hand in the public eye.
No more workshops and briefings where the media (and therefore the public) do not have ears on what’s happening. If it’s newsworthy, we’ll hear about it afterwards anyway – albeit the version of events the helpful church mice want to tell.
By the time JP McManus left City Hall last June after a behind-closed-doors meeting with councillors and management, the carry on was already headline news.
“It is important that democracy is exercised in public and that meetings be readily accessible to the public,” Mayor Moran said.
Well, that’s why we have a free press, no? Let us in, let us do our jobs. Leave it alone to us being barred from all but one of the new Local Community Safety Partnership meetings (the artist formerly known as the Joint Policing Committee).
Secrecy is the problem here, and transparency the obvious cure.
As the saying goes: “Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else”.
– Local Democracy Reporting Scheme