Changes to Cork City Council meetings sees improvement in timekeeping issues

In the first half of this year, arguments about timekeeping saw multiple Cork City Council meetings finishing before the full agenda was discussed but the issues seem to have been resolved in the last few months.

The meetings used to start at 5.30pm, with Cork City being one of the only local authorities in the country to have its meetings in the evening.

An 8pm finish time was officially listed but meetings were never concluded on time, frequently running past 10pm.

At the council’s March meeting, discussions around whether to continue or end the meeting took longer than the meeting would have taken to finish.

At the April meeting, councillors had agreed in advance to go to 9pm but 9pm struck and they were still mid-debate. Due to disagreements between parties, neither of the two proposed later running times were approved, so the councillors left the meeting without getting to hear any further motions, though almost all councillors were in favour of doing so in some manner.

Changes

At Green Party councillor Dan Boyle’s last meeting as lord mayor in June, changes to standing orders were approved, including meetings starting half an hour earlier at 5pm and rules stating each councillor can only put forward one “non-statutory” motion a month.

Since then, timekeeping has been less of an issue, with councillors always agreeing to carry on past 8pm. The changes have seen a slight reduction in running time also, with meetings usually ending by 9pm.

The lord mayor chairs the meeting, reading from a pre-arranged agenda. 

If a councillor wishes to speak on a certain motion, either stating they are in favour of it or do not think it should be approved, they must signal to the lord mayor, who makes note of speakers in the order they indicate they wish to speak.

They are allocated three minutes to state their case, and they cannot come in later in the debate to make another point. The lord mayor will tell councillors once they have reached their three-minute time limit and will cut a councillor off if they continue to speak.

Motions

Two standing order changes related to non-statutory motions were made. These motions, heard at the end of the meeting, are where Cork City Council engages with outside bodies, such as writing to the Government, NTA, or Uisce Éireann. They had proven contentious as the council executive left before they were heard, as they were not the direct responsibility of the council.

A newly inserted section states that, of the four motions each councillor is allowed to put forward per meeting, only one can be non-statutory and the time limit allowed to discuss them is reduced to two minutes for the proposer and one minute for each subsequent speaker.

Fergal Dennehy, the Fianna Fáil councillor who took over as lord mayor this summer, regularly reminds councillors to use their time wisely. Frequently, several councillors will seek to welcome a new development and Mr Dennehy often reminds them that an hour-and-a-half can easily be wasted if each of the 31 councillors spends three minutes saying something similar to their colleagues.