You were wrong in calling it a vanity act on the part of the city council. The city council have been trying for a very long time to have the 3 areas amalgamated in one way or another. As it stands the council and it’s staff is too big for the entire area. I know someone who is very high up in one of the councils and earns a huge amount. But this person does a job which has a job spec which is almost identical to 2 other high positions - in one council alone. If the three councils have similar set-ups (and I suspect they do) that means there are 9 people all extremely well paid to do one job between them.
Weirder was the situation last week when people were being moved from the Clare parts of Corbally that were flooding and Clare couldn’t send vehicles to help them move. Limerick city could have done it but wasn’t willing to as it wasn’t an emergency and was outside of their jurisdiction.
Indeed, the existing situation seems to be a result of tinkering by the British Administration in the 19th Century. Although they at least were willing to modify local government structures and boundaries when they felt the need. The current situation is just another example of us preserving inherited bureaucratic and governmental structures designed to maintain and upkeep a foreign occupation until they becomes self-serving, traditional and untouchable.
For Reference here is a map Limerick circa 1848 including the County of the City of Limerick, which seems a good bit larger than the existing city boundary.
You can do that all round the city. There is more or less a ring of green space stretching from the Crescent Shopping Centre, behind Southill, to Wheelers Garage and along the Groody river to the Shannon that follows the city/county boundary. In recent times parts of it have been developed to facilitate the new ring road and the Parkway Retail Park etc. A physical green doughnut as the boundary!
I moved from Cork to Limerick nine years ago, and it’s a particular bugbear of mine.
It was apparent very early on to me that the city centre is neglected at the expense of a short sighted county council. Worse, the rates from these suburban areas of the city appear to susidise towns in County Limerick. Adare, Newcastle west, Kilmallock are very nice, pretty, well maintained towns, while the city is being drained of life. Many middle class people lead very Americanized lifestyles, driving cars to everything and remaining disconnected from their local communities. Some really shortsighted people don’t want the city and county to merge because they fear their insurance premia would increase!
The city has some outstanding Georgian buildings, especially near the Southern part of the it, but many people prefer the dull sterile surroundings of the shopping centres which have zero character.
I hope and pray that the city and county councils merge, then I think Limerick could reach it’s full potential.
Basically every one of those with ‘Town’ in the title should be scrapped.
With the possible exception of Dublin - due to it’s size and population. There should be no more than one council per county. And even that may be too much in some cases.
All these councils still exist not out of necessity, but to maintain unnecessary jobs and a sense of local governance
and a sense is all it is - I think there should be way more stuff that is handled at a local level and then we could cut the number of TDs vastly and let them concern themselves only with the running of the country and leave parish-pump-politics to the parish-pump.
The thing is the councils have almost no power whatsoever. Most of the power of local government lies with the unelected officials such as the city/town/area manager.
Corrupt county managers are of far greater significance than corrupt councillors and we still pay that fraudster George Redmond about €80k a year of a pension
I have been in a room where a county manager basically ordered an executive planner to give planning permission forthwith… it was an administrative dispute about the maladministration of a planning application that ended up with the county manager on its inevitable way to the high court. The planner complied with alacrity the greasy little toad that he was thereby saving the council a lot of money. This was what we hoped for at the time
While his max takehome was €20k in his last year in office ( 1989) the CAB got €600k off Redmond in 1999 and there was no celtic tiger in Redmonds day
