Brendan bruised by 2020 ‘bailout’ blow

Bradley Bytes – A Sort of Political Column with Dara Bradley 

Brendan McGrath is used to getting his own way. The Chief Executive of Galway City Council can be very persuasive. Often, he has city councillors in the palm of his hand. Sure, last week didn’t he get a round of applause from councillors for executing a land deal. And that’s not the first time he’s been clapped.
But not this time. This time, in a small victory for local democracy, at Monday’s Special Council meeting, a majority of city councillors of different persuasions united to defer a decision to grant extra funding to Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture.
Brendan McGrath asked for €2.5 million but this time, councillors didn’t roll over for a belly-tickling. Instead they asked sensible, prudent questions about public money in the interest of openness and transparency. And Brendan, and Patricia Philbin, CEO of Galway 2020, were not great at answering them.
The pair fired out figures but one sticks out: €770,655, the amount of cold cash sponsorship that has been pledged to Galway 2020 from the private sector. Some €480,000 of it has been banked. A further €1.2m was pledged in “benefit in kind”. That’s nowhere near its €6.75m sponsorship target.
Another figure sticks out: €600,000 of the €2.5m ‘bailout’ requested will go towards salaries of Council staff seconded to Galway 2020. And – wait for it – according to Brendan, some of that €600,000 has already been spent, even though councillors haven’t yet approved it!
Brendan had nobody to blame but himself. He was on the back foot from the get-go. That was after a failed attempt to get this funding grant approved towards the end of the Ordinary meeting of the Council on the previous Monday. That got councillors’ ire up.
Brendan was unavoidably late arriving at last Monday’s Special Meeting because of a motorway pile-up, but there was no excuse for not having his homework done – especially given that he told councillors that he had taken a half-day the previous Friday, and hadn’t looked at his emails all weekend.
It was a schoolboy error not to have financial projections and details of the “additional” programme events the money is earmarked for. Brendan was perhaps expecting a rubberstamping; instead he got a bruising. He has another shot to get it right at the next meeting, February 9, two days after Galway 2020’s official launch.

For more Bradley Bytes about the general election campaign, see this week’s Galway City Tribune