Farewell to the farce of Zoom Council meetings

Farewell to the farce of online Galway City Council meetings.

Zoom meetings may return at some stage, if Covid-19 restrictions are reintroduced, but they’re coming to an end soon – and good riddance.

Over the past 18 months this column has documented problems with online Council meetings and hybrids, where councillors and officials attended in-person and online.

Online meetings were a necessary evil in a pandemic; far from ideal but better than the behind-closed-doors briefings that Chief Executive Brendan McGrath gave Councillors in the early days of Covid. Remember them?

No minutes. No media. Just cosy chats online between councillors and management. They were a disaster for democracy.

At least there was some semblance of normality when they met at Leisureland or Galmont Hotel and on Zoom.

But even those online Council meetings – with media in attendance – were bad for local democracy. And the hybrids were a joke altogether!

They undermined the democratic process. They made it harder to hold officials to account. They excluded the public. They were less open and transparent. They didn’t allow for proper debate. They discriminated against elected members who are not tech savvy. Time was wasted by people on mute or breakdowns in technology.

Then there were silly things like the chat function on Zoom. Councillors who attended in-person had no access to the chats the online councillors were having on the app. The ‘wave’ function caused confusion, too. Some councillors physically waved their hands at the screens, when the meeting administrator asked them to raise their (digital) hands to indicate they could hear.

We were reminded of the drudgery of online meetings at the January event, which – hopefully – will be one of the last online-only Council meetings ever.

A roll-call vote was taken on an amendment to a motion. Meetings Administrator Ailish Rohan went through the roll, seeking Councillors’ votes – for or against.

When she called out names of four councillors – Frank Fahy, Noel Larkin, Peter Keane and Clodagh Higgins – there was no reply. She established that the first three – Fahy, Larkin and Keane – had either sent apologies for their absence or had attended part of the meeting and indicated they had left.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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