Morale low as City Hall loses more key workers

Bradley Bytes – A Sort of Political Column by Dara Bradley

What’s going on at City Hall that’s made many staff jump ship?

That’s a question on the lips of elected members, who despair at seeing good people leave Galway City Council for employment elsewhere.

Former Mayor Mike Cubbard (Ind) put it well when he said: “There’s something amiss from a HR perspective.”

Some employees are poached from the private sector. That’s fair enough.

But as former Mayor Mike said: “They can’t all be running to better jobs in the private sector; half of them are going up the hill to the County Council!”

He said that City Council workers “are leaving every five minutes up there”. But then there are others – including outdoor workers – hired during Covid, who want to stay on but who didn’t get contracts renewed. And councillors are crying out to get jobs done – but there’s no-one to do the work!

Another former Mayor Niall McNelis (Lab) said job stability was a factor. “Of the 15 senior staff members in the Council, nine are on temporary contracts,” he said.

That’s not the full story either. Sure, the destination of some workers – County Hall – doesn’t even have a permanent Chief Executive and yet Galway County Council can lure them away.

The City Council’s Director of Finance, Declan Smyth, lasted just over a year in the role. His LinkedIn profile said that as of February he was working in finance for a private sector telecommunications company in Dublin.

“He did one budget and is now gone,” said former Mayor Mike.

Stephen Healy of the City Council’s Communications Team announced recently that he too was departing for pastures new. He’s not too long in the position, and will be a loss to the local authority, particularly from a social media perspective.

There are rumours that another senior engineer has left for County Hall, although it hasn’t yet been officially confirmed. There are others, too.

All have individual, personal reasons for leaving, no doubt.

But then factor in the fact that five workers took a case to the Labour Court because their gripe could not be solved locally. That ongoing dispute – which has impacted morale – relates to salary scales of workers who were ‘acting-up’ in more senior roles.

There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark, that’s for sure.

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

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