An Independent county candidate has pledged to vote against any increases in rates for small businesses through five years of the next council.
Independent Connemara candidate Ronan Garvey has pledged that he will not support any further increases on rate,s but will actively oppose such measures, if he is elected to the Galway County Council on May 23.
“Taxpayers and small business ratepayers are constantly expected to pick up the tab for any amount of excess, waste, or incompetence,” said Mr Garvey. “There’s been waste and junketeering endemic at local authority levels for years and local officials can make any number of expensive mistakes and there’s no way of holding them to account.”
As a result, accountability, waste, and inefficiency is a major plank of Mr Garvey’s campaign.
“Only independents are trying to address the accountability crisis that is a cancer in public life in Ireland,” he said. “The price of incompetence in FÁS was a big pay-off with a golden handshake from public funds; the price of failures in banking regulation were big lump sums and big fat pensions for life to the officials responsible. We’ve seen the same thing in the charity sector.”
He also wants to see a more supportive environment for SMEs throughout the county.
“If we can improve our small business environment,” he said, “we can all run better businesses, employ more people, create more local opportunities, increase local economic growth, stem the flow of emigration, encourage more start-ups, and ultimately give more opportunity to younger Connemara people.”
