Joe – a man more sinned against than sinning?

Bradley Bytes, a sort of political column by Dara Bradley

Joe Loughnane, the People Before Profit local election candidate, is a lay member of the Galway City Joint Policing Committee (JPC). But the poor divil has felt left out; felt discriminated against, even.

Joe has been on the JPC for the guts of a year and he hasn’t been appointed to one of its sub-committees, which meet quarterly between full JPC meetings.

Most people would take that as a blessing – sub-committees have less power than the full JPC, which are talking shops anyway, and they’re just more work for even less thanks.

But not Joe. No, Joe felt that not being a member of a sub-committee was some sort of a snub; that he was somehow a second-class JPC member; that others had conspired to keep him down and out by somehow not allowing him to join the sub-committee club.

And so there he was at the latest JPC, railing against this huge injustice against his person; taking a stand against his persecutors.

“I’m a member of the JPC for a year now and I’m not on a sub-committee,” he sulked, lip quivering.

This was his ‘you can take our lives but you can never take our sub-committee membership” William Wallace in Braveheart moment.

And those in the press gallery, and his colleagues, were metaphorically ready to ride into battle with Joe to fight the tyranny that has kept him away from enduring hours on end of talking nonsense at boring sub-committee meetings for the past 12 months.

That was until Gary McMahon, a Jack of All Trades at City Hall, who was stand-in meetings administrator, piped up and told the meeting that sub-committees of the JPC are not statutory bodies, and therefore any member of the JPC can self-nominate to a sub-committee of their choosing.

So, effectively, by not self-nominating, Joe has been discriminating against himself.
This is a preview only. For more Bradley Bytes, see this week’s Galway City Tribune. Buy a digital edition of this week’s paper here.