Facilities for hosting council meetings online 'not adequate'

Councillors from the Westport-Belmullet Municipal District again debated where their future meetings should be held.

Westport-based Fine Gael councillor Peter Flynn proposed at January’s meeting at Áras Inis Gluaire in Belmullet that all future meetings be held in Westport or Castlebar. He said that hosting meetings in Belmullet did not make sense because councillors had to travel long distances to attend the meeting and Áras Inis Gluaire could not facilitate members who wanted to attend the meeting online.

His proposal was met with criticism from members from the Erris area.

The issue was an item on the agenda at last week's meeting in Westport. Cllr Flynn said they should base their standing orders off Dublin City Council’s, whose approach to online “goes way beyond” theirs.

“What we have in our standing orders simply isn’t adequate. In theirs, they facilitate all-year round online meetings. The fact that Cllr [Brendan] Mulroy could not attend the meeting shows the weakness of the system,” Cllr Flynn said.

Cllr Flynn proposed they put it as an item in March’s meeting, to which Fianna Fáil Cllr Paul McNamara opposed.

“I don’t agree, I think members are always being facilitated. There’s no need to put it on the agenda again, Dublin can do it whatever way they want, and we’ll do it our way down here. Having meetings all around the district is so important, we went out to Murrisk and Clare Island and it was facilitated,” Cllr McNamara said. “I don’t see what the issue is when we only have three meetings left, some of us might not be here come June.”