New rules to put manners on disruptive city councillors

New rules to put manners on unruly city councillors will come before a meeting of the Council in July following a move by outgoing Mayor of Galway, Cllr Noel Larkin and several other local representatives to curb this behaviour.

At a special meeting of Galway City Council last week measures that would limit the ability of any individual councillor to unduly delay or disrupt proceedings were discussed.

Cllr Larkin said that failure to reach numerous items on the agenda of several meetings had led to these proposals being brought forward.

“Realistically, we spend three to four hours at a Council meeting and we get very little of the major business done,” said Cllr Larkin. “From my point of view, that is certainly due to the disruptive behaviour of certain councillors.”

One of the proposed rules would enable the Mayor or any councillor to call a vote to have a member removed from the chamber if they deem their behaviour to be disruptive.

If a councillor is particularly disruptive about one specific item on the agenda, they can be excluded from discussions of this item at any future meeting.

“If a councillor is being continually disruptive, there will be a mechanism that they may not be paid for attending that meeting – or a 10 per cent deduction in their allowances for that meeting.

“This would only be in very extreme cases where a councillor refused to leave a meeting,” added Cllr Larkin.

According to Cllr Larkin, the need for these new procedures was made more pressing by several instances in recent months where crucial agenda items were not touched upon as a result of chaos in the chamber.

“At a meeting that went on for four hours, there were consultants down from Dublin to discuss proposals for the new layout of the Kirwan Roundabout.

“We were there from 2pm and the meeting ended at 6pm but we hadn’t heard from the consultants – traffic is one of the major issues in the city and we walked away from that meeting without hearing from the consultants,” exclaimed Cllr Larkin.

The Mayor said he believed existing rules leave the Mayor, as chair of the meeting, toothless to deal with these issues – having no options available other than to suspend a meeting if one councillor is being troublesome.

“We go in there and we are ready to do business and maybe because of one unruly councillor, it has to be suspended – when you think of what that is costing, it is absolute madness.

“And then we are all tarred with the same brush of, ‘oh you get nothing done in there’ – and I have to say, I don’t blame the public for thinking that,” said Cllr Larkin.

The Mervue based councillor said that the issue of removing the prayer before meetings also highlighted the problem.

“I took some abuse at meetings that I probably should have raised but I just wanted to get on with proceedings.

“A councillor was roaring up at me about banning the prayer, ‘and I a Eucharistic Minister in Mervue’ – I wasn’t even at the meeting where they banned the prayer,” said Cllr Larkin.

As part of the changes, councillors will now be able to highlight their issues with previous minutes before the meeting – in the hope of eliminating a task that could sometimes take over an hour to deal with.

“I can’t understand why councillors can’t get a point across in three minutes without bull-roaring across the chamber.

“An awful lot of councillors are very frustrated because of this and I can only imagine what the CEO and the Directors of Services are feeling who are sitting there for hours waiting to make their input,” said Cllr Larkin.

Cllr Larkin, who will chair his last meeting as Mayor next month, said that these changes must happen to make the Council more efficient.

“There has to be a change because otherwise we are not making the main decisions we are supposed to be making.

“Banning the prayer is not a major issue – let’s get on to the housing problems and homelessness and the traffic,” he said.