LIMERICK Mayor John Moran should be given a second term in office, saving the taxpayer the expense of another election.
That’s the view of former first citizen and retired Fianna Fáil councillor Kevin Sheahan.
Mr Sheahan, the first Mayor after the amalgamation of Limerick City and County Councils, praised Mayor Moran for his performance to date.
“Now we have him, he’s performing very well, and I hope that when his term is up, and he’s performing well for the next three years, as he has done so far, that they don’t see the need to spend money on electing another mayor. This man should do two terms,” Sheahan told the Limerick Post.
“I was mayor once, and the biggest drawback from achieving what you want to achieve was the short period of time you held office. This man has already done two years, and he’s showing that the extra time in office can be very productive, and now that we see that, unless he does something drastically wrong, we should leave him.”
Sheahan, a larger than life character during his 39 years on the Council, takes the philosophical view that all change brings difficulties.
“It’s difficult to manage some of the difficulties, but some of the councillors, including Kevin Sheahan, had said repeatedly when this directly-elected mayor was first mooted that whoever ran for the job should have a qualification of having served either seven years as an employee of the local authority or an elected member of the local authority. That way, when they came in, we weren’t all strangers to each other, that’s where the difficulty lies. We’re all strangers, we all have different ways, whereas if our directly-elected mayor had done a term of familiarisation, he would have learned it on the job,” the former councillor said.
“People feel at times that he’s walking on somebody’s shoes, but he’s learning, and they’re learning too.”
Sheahan said that, between the Mayor and the Council, “it’s a learning process, and it’s taken longer than I thought it would, but I still say Dublin, the people who know everything, know nothing.”
“Dublin, inside the pale, they know everything, and us down here know nothing, that’s their attitude. But if they had listened to us, we’d have no difficulties with the elected mayor, but we were only poor peasants down here in their eyes.”
The Fianna Fáil man said that “Dublin disgusts me. If they read the Limerick Post, they’d have known the local papers report what we were saying. If they learned from what we said, there’d be 1000s more houses built in this country, if they copped on about backland development. Did you ever hear something so stupid?”
“If you lived within the speed limit area, you could have backland development, and if you were outside the speed limit area, you couldn’t. Did you ever hear the like of it?
“So, listen, our mayor has to walk before he can run. Next time round they can still put it right and avoid a lot of trouble if they insist that candidates have to have some experience.”
– Local Democracy Reporting Scheme