COUNCILLORS, a little advice for ye. Don’t panic over all this talk of meetings being live-streamed so the dogs on the street can watch ye act out your surrealist dramatics.
You’ve got this. Just remember, as an old player once said, ‘the best time for you to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust’. Keep that in mind and there will be none of ye carted off to jail cells.
Say nothing slanderous at public meetings and there will be no one taking away your bit of land or making you join a prison quilting group. Better slip with foot than tongue.
Seriously though, the poor craturs were in an awful state at last week’s wigged out local authority meeting when Mayor John Moran mooted the idea of live-streaming and recording their monthly eccentric art installations.
“I would be very perturbed if one of our councillors found themselves, in a heat of a moment, saying something, and it has happened here in this chamber, where one of our councillors was carted away to a Garda station for an alleged comment at a Council meeting. We need to be careful in what we are doing here,” Fine Gael councillor John Sheahan warned.
Call the cops, this lot are liable to libel!
Breaking out into a cold sweat, Cllr Tom Ruddle was planning a jailbreak. He was demanding “unlimited privilege” to slander whoever they please or else the Council to pay for insurance when they put foot in mouth.
“We did have a case here where a man was dragged into a Garda station over stuff he had said here in the chamber. All of us were rang around by the Gardaà and asked ‘what did he say?’ If any of us had said what he had said I’m afraid, he’d be in jail now,” the Fine Gael man suggested.
And speaking of slips, the mortifying melee 45-minutes into the debate on live-streaming meetings was, without question, a felony against rhyme or reason.
“The PrÃomh Chomhairleoir is after leaving the chamber,” Cllr Bridie Collins (FF) declared as jaws hit the floor.
Would someone not think of poor Cllr Sarah Beasley and her chest infection and Cllr Maria Donoghue’s children, off on holidays and their paella gone cold while mammy was sentenced to three-hours of insufferable adjournments.
“We’ll be back on Prime Time again,” Cllr Teskey cried as Alan English was already banging away on his keyboard to churn out his next Mayor of the Rings opus.
Don’t you know folks, sometimes the condemnation is more wicked than the crime.
– Local Democracy Reporting Scheme