City Council's conference call 'eavesdropper'

Galway City Council, like the rest of us, is adapting to the new reality of life under Covid-19 restrictions.

There haven’t been any face-to-face City Council meetings, be they full meetings or committee meetings, since the crisis really hit.

But that doesn’t mean elected members and management are twiddling their thumbs. Far from it – they’re busier than ever, just a different sort of busy.

Last Wednesday evening, city councillors held a conference call with Chief Executive Brendan McGrath.

Members of his management team were also involved in the meeting, which was conducted using technology that allows people to ‘attend’ a meeting online from the comfort of their own homes.

Each member is invited to the virtual meeting through a link sent to their email account. They click into this and then they are ‘in’ the meeting and can speak and see the others, also attending remotely.

A reliable deep-throat who participated in Wednesday’s chat informs us that the meeting had to be stopped – at the behest of McGrath – and restarted, over fears someone was eavesdropping.

The suspicion is that the link to join the meeting was sent to someone it shouldn’t have been, and this person attempted to listen in.

“Brendan halted the meeting and we had to hang up and start again because a mystery man was listening-in on the teleconference. It was hacked but Brendan has the number and can find out who it was,” said one source.

If the standard of debate at the tele-conference was anything like some of the drivel you can get at some ordinary Council meetings, then the conference-blocked hacker didn’t miss much!

For more Bradley Bytes, see this week's Galway City Tribune