Tipperary's largest town has 'suffered' in the last nine years

The people of Clonmel and the surrounding area felt that the town had been left down since the dissolution of both the town’s Borough Council and South Tipperary County Council nine years ago, Clonmel’s first citizen has stated.

Cllr Pat English told a meeting of Clonmel Borough District that they should be fighting for the restoration of the town’s twelve-member Borough Council/Corporation, and a seven-member South Tipperary County Council area.

“What is collected in Clonmel should stay in Clonmel. We need to have a proper stand alone council,” he said.

The District Mayor said that local democracy was being “chipped away at all the time”.

Cllr Richie Molloy agreed that the town had suffered since the 12-member council had been reduced to a Borough District of six members.

He said that a layer of democracy had been removed when that happened.

Cllr Molloy said that the ratio in France was one councillor for 300 people, but in Ireland it was just one councillor for every 5,000 citizens.

Cllr Michael Murphy said that the abolition of the Corporation/Borough Council had been a huge, retrograde step for Clonmel. All they had now were poorly-resourced administrations. He said that they had barely enough money to fill the potholes and cut the grass in housing estates, let alone prune trees.

He felt it was time to launch a new white paper on local government that would give them more power and resources. The last white paper on the reform of local government was in 2012.

However, the changes in 2014, which included the amalgamation of South and North Tipperary County Councils, didn’t realise the vision and ambition of that white paper, and what happened that year was wrong.

They should do whatever they could collectively to put Borough Council/Corporation status for Clonmel back on the agenda.
Cllr Murphy said that people had been imprisoned for campaigning for Catalonia’s independence from Spain, but he fully supported the calls for Clonmel’s independence.

Cllr Siobhán Ambrose didn’t agree that the town was being left behind, but she said that she would also prefer for the town to have its own autonomy.

She said that money was flowing into Clonmel for projects like the Regional Sports Hub, the new Garda Station, the Kickham Barracks Plaza and the expansion of Tipperary University Hospital, thanks to the hard work of a lot of people.

The six councillors on the Borough District worked very hard and Cllr Ambrose also acknowledged the work of the council staff.

Cllr Niall Dennehy had requested that the people’s constitutional right to two ballot papers would be upheld at next year’s local elections, as it was prior to 2014.

This would include ballot papers to a twelve-member Borough Council/Corporation, as well as a seven-member South Tipperary County Council area.

He said that in 1999 they had been guaranteed a vote to the Corporation and South Tipperary County Council, and any change would have required public consultation by way of a referendum.

However, that hadn’t happened.

District Administrator Carol Creighton said that Darragh O’Brien, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, indicated last February that he had no plans to amend the local electoral areas in advance of the 2024 local elections.

A boundary committee, established in 2017, and which reported in June 2018, recommended alterations to municipal districts and local electoral areas, which were implemented in December 2018.

The districts and local electoral areas for county Tipperary were used at the 2019 local elections, the District Administrator added.