Tynan rejects council "merger" plan saying "Hands Off Our City"

Cork CITY Hall

Cork Workers’ Party Councillor Ted Tynan has said that the proposed merger of Cork City and County Councils would be a disaster for the city and would not be positive for the county either.

Cllr. Tynan said that proposed merger made no sense from either a social, urban development, or good governance perspective.  He said the proposal amounted to nothing less than the extinguishment of Cork’s 1,000 year old existence as a city.

The Workers Party councillor said that the government had predetermined the agenda and that the statutory committee which had made the proposal was acting to that agenda.  “The fact that two of the five members dissented from the agenda shows how preposterous this proposal is.  It is purely based on saving money, not on common sense or the efficient delivery of local government services. The proposal will merely make local administration more remote and inaccessible to citizens”, said Cllr. Tynan.

“If merging two already large councils like Cork City and County Councils  made any sense then the inevitable outcome of this policy would be to end up with about six councils in the entire country – these would be six of the most unwieldy and unworkable councils ever created”, he said

Cllr. Tynan said that the proposal was not a merger but a takeover of Cork City by the larger County Council.  It would result in a dilution of democratic accountability and unworkable local electoral areas.  “In short this plan would be a disaster for the city and a disaster for the county.”

The Workers Party councillor has welcomed the comments of Lord Mayor Cllr. Chris O’Leary but has said that the opposition to the proposed merger must be widened out to the general public and all stakeholders in society.  “This is not just the merger of two councils, it is the abolition of our city, a city with a thousand year long tradition. If there was ever a reason for the city to earn the name Rebel Cork it is now.  The people of Cork City should stand united and say to Alan Kelly, the government and the three majority authors of this report HANDS OFF OUR CITY”

Tynan condemns proposed rent hike for Cork City tenants

Boarded up council house in Cork City

500 empty housing units in Cork City alone

Workers Party Councillor Ted Tynan has hit out at proposals by Cork City Council to increase housing rents in order to cover the council’s Property Tax bill.  He described the 2014 estimates proposals as “death by a thousand cuts” for council services.

Cllr. Tynan also questioned a report leaked to RTE which showed 3,500 vacant council homes in the state.  He pointed out that there were 500 such units in Cork City alone.

“The proposal to pass on property tax to council tenants exposes the true nature of this tax”, said Cllr. Tynan”, “Firstly that this is not a property tax but rather a tax on the family home since non property owners are now expected to pay.  Secondly it demolishes the government’s claim that the Property Tax is about funding local government.  This is ludicrous when local government itself is levied with this tax and seeks to pass the charge on to its tenants.”

“Once again Cork City Council is being left seriously short of government funding.  The result will undoubtedly be massive additional cuts in council services, especially in the area of housing maintenance.    The council is unable to renovate the 500 empty dwellings it owns and offer them to some of those on the housing list.  To make things worse it has emerged that funding under the RAPID scheme for five Community Safety Wardens on council estates is not going to be paid next year meaning the probable loss of these key workers who play a vital role in combating anti-social behaviour, illegal dumping and other issues.”

Cllr. Tynan said there will be strong opposition to any attempt to increase rent, especially to levy the property tax onto tenants.  “Once again local government services in Cork are being decimated by an unholy alliance government, the city hall pact parties and management, Cork’s very own Troika of destruction.”, said Cllr. Tynan.

Tynan opposes Pact nominee for Lord Mayor

Speech by Councillor Ted Tynan (Workers’ Party) opposing election of Cllr. Catherine Clancy as Lord Mayor of Cork, Friday, 21^st June 2013.

 

 

"Lord Mayor, Councillors, City Manager

 

I will be brief, as I know some of you have celebrations to go to tonight, celebrations of another foregone conclusion which the members of the pact here call an election.  You see the outcome of tonight’s mayoral election was decided more or less four years ago.  The person who will become Lord Mayor tonight was able to book her celebratory party many months ago; 12 months or more according to some sources.   Most of the seating in the public gallery has been reserved for the supporters of Councillor Clancy even though there is going to be more than one candidate here tonight.  What an awful inconvenience it must be for Cllr. Clancy and her Labour Party friends to have to go through the motions of an election and have to listen to democratically elected members who are not prepared to accept an appointment by acclamation.

 

Democracy, it would seem, is an inconvenience for the establishment parties here tonight.  They would prefer the pomp and circumstance of a changing of the guard.

 

The Workers’ Party in Cork has made the decision to support a challenge in tonight’s election.  I intend to second the nomination of Councillor Henry Cremin so that a vote can be forced tonight.  There are many differences of policy between the Workers’ Party and Cllr. Cremin’s party, Sinn Féin.  Yet I recognise that Cllr. Cremin is a hard-working and active councillor who has as much claim to the mayoralty as the candidate of the Pact.  He is much more in touch with ordinary people and has a solid record of working with them and on their behalf. 

 

I would urge the media here not to regard this challenge tonight as mere theatre or a sideshow, a bit of colour-writing to put at the end of a lengthy eulogy for the new Lord Mayor.  It is a serious choice for the councillors, whether they are prepared to sustain an undemocratic pact which has lasted more than a third of a century.

 

This is not simply about the pact however; it is about the policies of all three of these parties of the monied establishment.  Over the past number of years they have, between them, imposed appalling hardship through their support for austerity at local, national and international level.  Nationally Fianna Fáil imposed the bank bailouts and the Troika on ordinary working people with devastating consequences.  Fine Gael and Labour rubber stamped the same situation with a few cosmetic tweaks here and there, but the result has been the same. As we wait here for the crowning of a new Lord Mayor, thousands of parents of special needs children worry about the effects of the latest cuts in funding, while local authority tenants wonder what happened to the council’s housing maintenance scheme and those on the housing list must be in despair.  They must be bewildered by this circus here tonight, and they would be right to seethe with anger.

 

Before I conclude I refer to the €106,000 per annum salary of the office of Lord Mayor.  This is almost three times the average industrial salary.  It is ten times what an old-age pensioner receives.  On a daily basis here councillors, including those intending to support the Pact candidate, are told there is no money for one important service or another, be it replacement of street lighting, broken footpaths or whatever.  Some of them make a meal out of sending out leaflets to their constituents telling them how hard they fought to get something fixed but that there were no funds.  They don’t state the reason, that those funds have been cut by their own parties in order to bailout zombie banks.  This is the height of hypocrisy and shows how totally insincere these councillors are.

 

So go to your celebrations tonight. Pat one another on the back on getting another one up on the smaller parties and independents, the begrudgers as you would have it; because in a little under 12 months it won’t be the parties in here you’ll be worrying about, but the voters out there. You will be not be judged on your glossy leaflets or smug posters, but on your record and tonight you are adding another black mark to that appalling report card."

 

Thank You,

 

Councillor Ted Tynan

 

 

Tax the Greedy, not the Needy - No to Water Charges

The word is out, the Commission on Taxation, set up by the government over 18 months ago to overhaul this country's taxation system, is recommending further stealth taxes on ordinary workers and their families including the introduction of water charges, a tax on the family home and taxation of Child Benefit (Children's Allowance).

The terms of reference of the Commission on Taxation were deliberately framed in such a way as to prevent it dealing with probably the most glaring problems of the Irish taxation system - it was not allowed to consider increasing Corporation Tax on big business and was advised not to actually increase the overall tax take despite the fact that billions of euro of profits are being made in this country by those not paying their fair share of tax.

It should be no surprise that this QUANGO came up with an anti-worker and anti-family report. No less than 11 of the 16 members of the Commission (appointed by the Fianna Fáil / Green mudguard government) are from the business community and I don't mean your local shop but big business, very big business. There was one lone representative on the commission from the trade union movement and another token member from the voluntary sector. Add in a few right-wing economists and it becomes clear that this commission was rigged from the outset to come up with the government's favoured outcome - just like the so-called Bord Snip.

The Workers Party is very clear on the question of water charges. Like refuse charges they are a form ouf double taxation. If you are a PAYE worker or ever buy anything in this country you are already contributing to the funding of local government. You pay into local government when you pay for your electricity, buy a newspaper or a book and when you buy a so-called luxury item like a television or a fridge. When rates were abolished almost 30 years ago the shortfall was made up by increases in PAYE and VAT - increases which were never abolished.

Let's be clear about this - these proposals, coupled with the cutbacks proposed in the McCarthy Report and the levies already imposed in last year's budget and mini-budget, will mean the government plans to take up to €5,000 per annum from your pay packet if you are a PAYE worker and will further penalise you if you are unfortunate enough to be unemployed, on a small pension or in the low paid category.

In the coming months there will be a battle on Cork City Council in relation to the annual Estimates. It is now clear that further massive cutbacks in the council's services are to be made while increases in rents and refuse charges are definitely on the cards. The Workers Party will not be bullied into supporting these measures and we will not support any budget for the city which underfunds basic services, cuts jobs or contains service charges in any shape or form.

Have no doubt about it, the party and others opposing the Estimates are going to come under massive attack from the establishment parties for our stand. Fine Gael, Labour and possibly others will line up behind Fianna Fáil and further slash already curtailed services such as housing maintenance, road repair, parks, libraries and other services which are essential to this city. They will try to turn the blame back on us and will claim that it is our fault that jobs will be lost and the council will be abolished if the Estimates are defeated. This is simply a lie. We all know why 91 jobs have already been lost in the City Council and why housing and housing maintenance have ground to a halt. This is 100% down to the policies of the present government and the government in waiting of FG / Labour (which are almost identical anyway). Ordinary workers and their families are to be made pay for the sheer greed and reckless trading of banks and building speculators.

We have seen the state and the courts bend over backwards to prevent the Carroll Group from being liquidated while at the same time people in trouble with their mortgages are being hounded and having their homes repossessed by the same banks. The government has agreed to a bank bailout which potentially puts the state at the risk of losing up to €100 Billion - that's right €100,000,000,000 of your hard earned money. Fine Gael and Labour only disagree on the finer details but still support the concept of aiding the banks with vast amounts of taxpayer's money.

The battle lines are drawn. Workers and their families are now under sustained attack from the government, the banks, sections of the media and international capitalism as never before. This alone is reason enough to reject the Lisbon Treaty at the forthcoming referendum which is the second attempt - á la carte democracy where you can re-run a referendum if you don't like the first result. It is in the interests of workers and the poor to firmly reject this treaty which further enslaves working people, finally ditches our neutrality and puts in place another building block towards an EU superstate. Vote No to the Lisbon Treaty on October 2nd.

Eight week council break unnacceptable

Tomorrow's meeting of Cork City Council (13th July) will be its last for eight weeks until it reconvenes on Monday, 14th September, just 2 days before the Dáil returns from its 9 week break.

This is simply not acceptable, particularly at a time when the council is experiencing serious cuts in its budget and a shortfall of at least €2 million in its budget and possibly a much greater shortfall next year. Already 91 temporary and short term staff have been left go and there is a total embargo on recruitment. In addition to this there are threats of cuts in a wide range of council services.

Despite this, tomorrow's City Council meeting will be proposing to send a number of councillors to conferences around the country and in my view and that of the Workers Party this is totally unacceptable and I will be opposing this. It is not justified when the council cannot respond adequately to the demand for services such as housing maintenance. I would also question the value of most, if not all of these conferences.

In addition to this, I have proposed a motion opposing the closure of St. Mary's Road Library in Gurranabraher and the City Council's plan to move the library to a rented premises in Blackpool Shopping Centre. The current premises is owned by the City Council; the proposed one will incur rent in the region of €100,000 payable to one of Cork's wealthiest businessmen, an individual who within the last year was forced to pay over €1.4 million to the Revenue Commissioners arising out of the inquiry into the Ansbacher Accounts tax evasion scam. Is it right that the City Council should pay half a million Euro to this man over the lifetime of this council when it is suffering its greatest financial crisis ever? I think not.

I also have tabled a motion calling for the provision of street nameplates at Silversprings Lawn and Silversprings Court which do not have nameplates despite having being built almost 30 years ago.

Another motion which I am hoping will come up is calling on the City Council to make boarded up corporation houses ready and available for allocation to people on the council's waiting list. It is totally unacceptable that at a time when there are 5,000 people on the City Council's housing waiting list that we have hundreds of houses and flats boarded up. Not only are these houses and flats unsightly but they attract anti-social elements into an area and illegal dumping. This is an issue that I along with my Workers Party fellow candidates Jackie Connolly and Mick Crowley raised during last month's local elections and we intend to follow through on the matter as a matter of urgency.

One motion I have proposed is sure to cause controversy and I make no apologies for that. It is a call for an inquiry into the Corrib Gas Project. Although this is far away in County Mayo it does have relevance to the people of Cork because the Irish taxpayers are being denied billions of Euro of revenue as a result of a dirty deal done by the former Fianna Fáil government minister Ray Burke with the Shell Oil corporation (Anglo Dutch Shell) and other oil and gas companies to pump gas ashore and refine it at Bellanaboy in Co. Mayo. The state, on behalf of the Irish people, should have got billions of Euro for this gas but instead it was practically given away to Shell and the company have been allowed bring it ashore via a very high pressure gas pipeline which pumps gas at an extraordinarly high pressure of 345 Bar (compared to a maximum of 70 Bar at Kinsale Head gasfield) across boggy land in an area where there have been several major landslides over the past decade.

Shell have been facilitated in this by the granting of a compulsory purchase order allowing them to put their pipeline through the property of local families (mostly small farmers and fishermen) and dangerously close to many of their homes. This small community has opposed the pipeline out of genuine concern for the safety of themselves and their families. They have used non-violent resistance to try and prevent the destruction of their beaches, bogs and farms. Despite being a designated area of special environmental interest, the project is being forced through with the help of up to 300 gardaí, the Irish Navy and up to 160 private security personnel. There is a serious question mark hanging over the largest of these private security companies arising from an incident in which two of its employees, both of whom had been employed at the Corrib Gas site, were shot dead in Bolivia and were accused by the government of that country of being involved in an attempted Coup d'etat. While the book is still open on that case, there are very serious questions arising from it which link directly to Corrib and the type of people being recruited for security duty by Shell's protectors.

Five local men from the Rossport were jailed for 90 days and many others have been arrested. There are so many incidents related to this debacle that it would take up too much space here to relate but you can read much more on the Shell to Sea website at www.shelltosea.com or on Indymedia www.indymedia.ie


Finally, while the City Council may not be meeting until September 14th, I will continue to be available to consitutents and anyone who may wish to raise an issue of concern with me. As always I can be contacted on my mobile (086) 190 8281 or by e-mail at tedtynan@gmail.com