Councillors’ Christmas cheer: ‘You scumbag, you liar, you …’

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

Christmas is the season of goodwill to all men but it is in short supply at City Hall. Galway City Councillors were pricklier than your average holly bush at the end-of-year meeting as sores were picked to settle old scores before they headed off battered and bloodied for the festive break.

Peace on Earth quickly turned to ‘I’ll give you a piece of my mind’ as councillors kept with the unseemly not-just-for-Christmas tradition of making a holy show of themselves . . . and this was before any alcohol was consumed at annual mayor’s Yuletide bash.

Elected members couldn’t even get through the minutes of the previous two meetings without a good old fashioned bun fight.

Pádraig Conneely (FG), never one to shy away from confrontation, was first to lob a mince pie in the direction of Michael John Crowe (FF).

Regular readers will recall that PC and MJ were never ‘besties’ to begin with but their relationship plunged to new depths in 2015 when the latter called the former a ‘scumbag’ in an email.

We won’t bore you with rehashing the details – Pádraig has done enough of that every opportunity he gets – but the indications were that the matter had been resolved.

MJ had, as requested by the ‘offended’ party, written another email retracting the scumbag remark, and expressing regret for having made it.

That, everyone thought, was that. But Pádraig couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie, and decided instead to give the canine a good kicking, just as the controversy appeared to be dying down.

Pádraig, with the enthusiastic energy of a boy that had just got a new train set off Santa, was bursting to tell the meeting of MJ’s retraction. His gleeful gloating set the tone of the one-upmanship that followed, as giddy councillors behaved like they were audtioning for the lead part in the Renmore Panto.

Pearce and Catherine’s Christmas crackers

And while MJ didn’t take the bait, and showed remarkable restraint in not responding, the same can’t be said of Catherine Connolly (Ind), who tried in vain to bite her lip after Pearce Flannery (FG) launched a blistering attack.

Still discussing minutes, Pearce ‘take no prisoners’ Flannery was in combative mode.

Apparently at the previous meeting, he accused Catherine of leaving a public meeting early. This was disputed by Catherine, and her version had been verified by Donal Lyons (Ind). She had demanded an apology from Pearce.

Pearce told the latest Council meeting that on reflection “and in the cold light of day” an apology was in order.

Catherine nearly fell off her seat – for a split second it seemed Pearce was actually going to say the hardest word: ‘sorry’.

But the businessman had lulled her into a false sense of security and then hit Catherine with the charge that it was her who owed him the apology, not the other way round.

Pearce said he had checked his facts again, and his original accusation stood. “An apology is owing from you to me,” he snorted, with all the gusto of Shane McGowan in Fairytale of New York.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.