Comment: Cork County Council should detail benefits of foreign trips

Twelve elected members and two officials of Cork County Council spent three days this week in Brussels on a study trip dedicated to finding out more about funding streams the local authority could avail of to benefit decarbonisation, energy renewal, and tourism projects back home.

A councillor on the study trip said that the expectation was that the information and insights gleaned in Brussels would lead to multiples of the €10,533.54 it took to send them to Brussels being reinvested in Cork by the EU in the form of grant aid.

This is good news, isn’t it? And good news should be proclaimed out loud and as widely as possible. However, the local authority did not issue a press release about this study trip.

It was left to this reporter to find out about it in the Mayor’s Diary, a very useful document indeed, issued every Friday detailing the engagements of the county’s first citizen for the following fortnight. Even that document only mentioned that the Mayor was travelling and not for how long.

The rest of the information, carried in a report in The Echo this week, was by way of a response to a query from this newspaper.

A previous trip was undertaken by County Mayor Joe Carroll and his Fianna Fáil party colleague Frank O’Flynn and two council officials to China before Christmas, and a request to speak with the participants about this trip and what transpired on it and, specifically, the benefits which could accrue was met with a response along the lines of: nobody was available to speak about it.

The trip, which cost €11,830 in total, between flights and accommodation, was described by a council spokesperson as strengthening Cork County Council’s “long-standing partnership with Jiangsu Province established in 2013”.

Cork’s connection to China comes with undoubted benefits, but what’s the harm in talking about this and telling the people of Cork the good news? In the absence of good news to report, and photographs, councillors who travel on such trips can’t complain if articles about foreign trips by elected members focus on the cost of flights and accommodation.

This is a lesson that should be borne in mind in advance of the annual Cork County Council study trip to the USA, where councillors travel to Chicago and New York, meeting their counterparts there and, also, participating in St Patrick’s Day festivities.