Council wants to keep area offices open

The issue of the retainment of the network of area offices operated by Mayo County Council has been a worry for a number of councillors and members of the public as the council has seen its budgets slashed over the past number of years. However it is the council’s intention to keep these area offices open, according to county manager Peter Hynes. Speaking at Monday’s annual budget meeting of the council. Mr Hynes said: “We haven’t had a single library close in this county, a single fire station close in this county, or area office close other than rationalising two in the last 10 years. What I said is that it would be my view that we would continue with providing the services to the community as close as we can, through our existing office network and only if that’s not possible will we look to close offices. That may mean we need to rationalise the offices we have, we may need to put in specialist teams to run them. We may need to change what they do, and we may need to put information points into one or two rather than full service points.”