We all suffer from Council’s ‘conference call’ democracy

Bradley Bytes – a sort of political column by Dara Bradley

Elected members at City Hall haven’t met for a Council meeting in seven weeks. Let that sink in for a moment. That’s seven weeks without proper democratic decision-making at local level.

And that’s two months of the Chief Executive of Galway City Council, Brendan McGrath calling the shots, with some input from the other unelected management team and Directors of Services.

It’s not just the Ordinary Council meetings that haven’t met, committee meetings and SPCs (Strategic Policy Committees SPCS) are all suspended due to Covid-19.

Decisions are still being made, of course; and they’re decisions that impact on every person who lives within the city boundary.

The problem is they are being made behind closed doors, by unelected officials, and without scrutiny or transparency as to how officials have arrived at those decisions.

And we all know that decisions that are not challenged, or scrutinised, or made in a transparent and open forum, can result in bad policy, and poor outcomes. And when that happens, who will be accountable?

Yes, the six city councillors from each of the three electoral areas are having weekly conference calls with senior management. And, of course, having all 18 on a Zoom call may be unwieldy. But what’s happening now makes a mockery of local democracy.

Cosy chats of a Monday evening – away from the beady eyes of local media and by extension, the general public – are no substitute for Council meetings where journalists and members of the public can not only record decisions taken, but can document how these were arrived at.

After – or sometimes even during – the conference calls, councillors rush to update their social media as to what they said at the conference call.

Twitter and Facebook updates of one person’s view of a teleconference does not transparency make, no matter how well-intentioned they are.

It’s what they don’t tell you in those public updates – about the decisions taken, or relayed by senior management at these virtual meetings – that we should all be afraid of.

A basic tenet of healthy local democracy is transparency, which has been lacking in Galway for seven weeks and counting.
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