Death threats against council staff and elected representatives are now par for the course, the CEO of Galway City Council said this week after security arrangements had to be made to allow staff leave City Hall safely.
Speaking after the contentious debate on the Salthill cycleway proposal, Brendan McGrath said that he had spoken to all 18 councillors and they had all received severe abuse via phone calls, people shouting at them through car windows, emails and social media.
“Our public representative are there to do a job and if we want people to enter politics in the future, this will deter good people from doing so,” he said, adding that he was appalled at the level of abuse aimed at Mayor Collette Connolly in the past few weeks.
'Appalled'
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“In the last few years, this trend of thinking you can abuse people has taken hold. I am appalled at what the Mayor has told me regarding the way she has been treated by people when she is there trying to do a job on behalf of the whole city.
“What sort of society are we moving towards if this is the way people are going to try and influence their cause. Most people are reasonable. People shouldn’t have to take this. We should be able as a mature society to be able to put forward our argument. This abuse of people just cannot go on. We need to have a debate about what is acceptable in public life and what isn’t.
“We had death threats made to staff on a separate matter on Monday, and we had to make arrangements to allow our staff to leave our building safely. Respect for human beings, those common qualities of decency that were in society once are gone. It is soul destroying,” he said.
Volume of abuse
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Mayor Connolly said that she and the other councillors had never experienced such a volume of abuse. She said that people need to start respecting other people’s opinions.
“I don’t complain too much, but quite frankly, I have my own limits, but when people call me names and treat me with disdain, it is too much. She said that coming away from the Prom cycle on Sunday, a woman in a car rolled down her window and abused her verbally.
