Lynch concerned over county council’s ‘Ennis bias’

A WEST Clare councillor has called for equality for his area, saying that many people have the impression that the local authority’s unofficial title is ‘Ennis County Council’.

Councillor Ian Lynch made his remarks at the January meeting of the West Clare Municipal District when he called for the area to have its own plan to rival the recently unveiled Ennis 2040 blueprint.

“What I’m looking for is equality among the municipal districts,” he said. “This came up at the county council meeting when we were told that Ennis 2040 is not just a municipal district plan, it’s a county-wide plan. Well, I take a bit of offence to that. That plan was put together by the hard work of the municipal district in Ennis. We are a municipal district with the same size and the same clout as Ennis, and in this motion, I’m requesting that we have a strategic plan, broken into two distinct areas. There’s very strategic thinking that we need to do about things like housing. If we could build three houses in one village, for example, we could maintain the school and the post office.”

The Independent councillor clarified that he was not denying Ennis its opportunities for growth. “Ennis have got this [plan] and I will get accused of being ‘anti-Ennis’ but I’m not anti-Ennis. I’m very much in favour of equality,” he said. “For a long time, I’ve been working with community groups in West Clare who say, ‘It’s Ennis County Council’. It is the county town and I appreciate that. I’m not taking from that and we need the investment in it as it grows, but we need the same focus put on our municipal district. We need a strategic plan that’s put together by the nine councillors, the executive and the public for how they want our area to grow. I think that with all of the funding that’s available with Covid, the only way we can be taking seriously when putting our hand out for it is to say, ‘This is our plan’.

Councillor Lynch also noted that a number of strategic documents are now based on figures and thinking that the pandemic has radically changed.

“We need to have a plan, not just for this council term, but going forward, about how we envisage this area of our county and where it’s going and how it will develop for the future and its future inhabitants,” he said. “Ennis [plan] was done looking at figures and population for a different era. The world has changed drastically. Those figures have changed and we’re now looking at developing areas of our county based on the past, when we should be looking to the real future. Those growth predictions focus very much on towns, but in reality, with remote working, we should now be looking at developing rural areas. If we don’t develop those areas, why would people come to live in them?”

Director of Service for West Clare Leonard Vaughan said that he and Councillor Lynch were thinking along similar tracks and said he would confer with the Director of Economic Development, Liam Conneally, to see what context the County Development Plan could give to a specific West MD focus. “I’ve seen lots of plans over my time in the council and, if I have any frustration, it’s that some of the plans never turn into projects,” he said. “That’s why I steered the West Clare MD onto specific projects that we might actually achieve and make happen. Plans can be great in terms of vision, but I have a project-bias, if I could put it that way. I hear what you’re saying and we need to give a bit of attention to the developmental, economic and the vision at the front end of those projects.”

The motion was seconded by Councillor Cillian Murphy. “Ennis 2040, I like the timeline on that,” he said. “It’s 20 years, so that when something happens in the middle of it, like Covid, it’s not skewed completely. If you have a five-year plan and Covid happens after the third year and it takes a-year-and-a-half to two years, you’re whole plan is out the window. I think it will stand to us to have a 20-year plan for this municipal district and its two Local Electoral Areas (LEAs) and what it will look like in 20 years’ time.”

Cathaoirleach, Councillor Joe Garrihy said he appreciated the director’s “can-do approach,” and said that Covid had changed many regional and national plans projections. “If Charlie McGreevey was still around the proposed decentralisation now, it might look a bit more realistic and doable,” he said.