Vote of sympathy as CoR says au revoir to Declan

There was a mini earthquake around Mervue last Friday week – and it wasn’t weather related. The earth moved, we hear, after the bombshell was dropped that former Progressive Democrats, now Independent city councillor, Declan McDonnell, was not going to be reappointed to the European Committee of the Regions (CoR).

As plum jobs go at local authority level, the Committee of the Regions is as good as it gets. It’s the crème de la crème of appointments for councillors.

It involves plenty of foreign travel to Brussels and Luxembourg where elected representatives are wined and dined and given a taste of what it’d be like to be a real politician, like an MEP or better still, a European Commissioner.

It’s a lucrative enough gig, too, according to those in the know, and the pocket money you get for being on the Committee of the Regions is a decent supplement to a councillor’s income.

No wonder wailing was heard round Mervue, when some poor civil servant from the relevant Government department had to break it gently to Declan that he was no longer on the committee.

In fairness, he had a good innings on it – around 12 years, apparently – and it’s certainly not a gig for life.

After hearing the news on the Friday, Declan didn’t attend the following Monday’s City Council meeting. Apparently he was sick.

Whether the sickness was precipitated by his shock demotion from the committee would amount to mere conjecture and we couldn’t possibly comment.

But that didn’t stop his colleagues on the Council from marking his European demise. Fianna Fáil’s Ollie Crowe, the sympathetic soul that he is, even proposed a vote of sympathy for Declan for losing out on the role. Independent Terry ‘Polltopper’ O’Flaherty was goaded into seconding the motion but politely declined.

Another suggested they do a ‘whip round’ for him, to compensate for any potential loss of income.

With friends like that . . .

Mairéad the bog hopping city slicker

Mairéad Farrell is a city slicker.

She lives in the city. She went to school and university in the city. She works in the city. But there’s a bit of a country bumpkin in her too.

One of Sinn Féin’s three new councillors elected to Galway City Council, Mairéad is getting used to the rough and tumble of local politics.

She’s becoming accustomed to the political bun fights in the Council chamber and political dog-fights outside it.

And she’s also a prominent figure in the county’s bog wars.

She doesn’t appear to be a ‘bogger’, but Mairéad, we’re reliably told, regularly attends protests in solidarity of turf-cutters.

She’s been spotted on bogs all around Galway including those owned by members of the Clonmoylan, Barroughter and Ardraigue Bog Action Group, who are defying the ban on turf-cutting on bogs designated as SACs (Special Areas of Conservation).

She even gave a speech recently at a turf-cutters celebration rally in Treacy’s of Killimor where the crowd vowed to continue to flout the ban on cutting turf in 2015.

There’re no votes round Killimor for her but it does her no harm either.

By aligning herself with the bog warriors, it plays well with the anti-Europe, anti-Government, anti-establishment, anti-everything vibe that Mairéad tapped into to get elected.

Or maybe it’s just that she likes using turf as fuel for her stove in her Mervue home.

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