The idea of scrapping town councils and county development boards, and merging Mayo and Roscommon county councils into one administrative unit as proposed under the Local Government Efficiency Review Groups report was strongly rejected by the elected members of Mayo County Council this week.
At the December meeting of the council, Fine Gael councillor Eugene McCormack hit out: “There are so many projects going on in Castlebar alone if it wasn’t for the town council and the town manager half of them would never have happened,” he said.
Cllr Peter Flynn stated: “Having served on the Westport Town Council for a number of years I can say that a lot of great work is done by them, and just because they’re not working in other areas doesn’t mean you have to scrap them, and as for the scrapping of the county development boards, it’s crazy, they do a huge amount of good work for the county.”
Cllr Flynn also spoke out at the proposed merging of Mayo and Roscommon into one administrative unit, as did Independent councillor Gerry Ginty who described the idea as “ludicrous”, while Cathaoirleach Cllr Michael Burke told the meeting, “We have 100,000 people to look after already and we don’t need any more.”
