Limerick City Boundary Extension

Limerick a city ‘in danger of decline‘ (Irish Times)

GORDON DEEGAN

LIMERICK IS a city in danger of terminal decline and a boundary extension of the city into urban parts of Co Clare and Co Limerick should take place, according to the founding president of the University of Limerick (UL), Dr Ed Walsh.

Dr Walsh is one of three prominent Limerick educationalists demanding change to Limerick city’s governance.

In his submission to the Government-established committee to examine the future governance of Limerick city and county, Dr Walsh said Limerick was a weak city but had the potential to be a strong regional city of 100,000 if the boundary was extended to embrace the urban population and unitary governance was provided.

Dr Walsh also recommended that the councils of Limerick city and county should not be unified.

The closing date for submissions was yesterday.

The UL campus is located in lands in the Limerick County Council and Clare County Council areas.

In a separate submission, the current president of UL, Prof Don Barry, said: “Limerick city currently lacks a single vision.”

He added: “Plans for the improvement of quality of life are disjointed and in many cases one part of the city is competing with another . . . The university would urge the committee to make a clear and decisive recommendation . . . and the implementation of the plan must be the responsibility of a single body that is focused on the achievement of that plan.”

In his submission, the president of Mary Immaculate College, Prof Peadar Cremin, voiced his opposition to merging Limerick city and county councils as a solution.

“On the long-term strategic level, we believe that a significant extension of the boundary is vital if Limerick city is to fulfil its developmental role as a gateway city under the national spatial strategy.”

The closing date for submissions was yesterday.

So its endgame time for the Department of Environment to make a decision on this proposal / application which has been with them since October 2004!

Let common sense prevail!

40 GROUPS GIVE THEIR OPINION ON HOW LIMERICK SHOULD BE GOVERNED (live95fm)

40 groups have given their opinions about how Limerick should be governed.

The closing date for submissions to the Limerick Local Government Committee passed yesterday.

The five person committee will now compile a report for the Minister for the Environment John Gormley, who will then decide the future make up of local government in Limerick.

No date has been set for the final report to be submitted to the Minister.

Live95fm’s Denis Tierney has more…(to hear audio, click the link below)

Members of the Limerick Local Government Committee will begin sifting through the 40 submissions today as the work to decide the future of Limerick’s local authorities begins.

The Committee led by Denis Brosnan will examine the submissions received and meetings with selected groups are to be arranged as soon as possible.

All submissions will be available online.

Among the submissions are Limerick City Council who want an extension to the city boundary, with Limerick County Council calling for a single Limerick authority.

Limerick Chamber is calling for the best of both, with an extended city within a unified authority.

Clare County Council are not prepared ‘to give an inch’ but are calling for greater co-operation between the authorities, while An Taisce have submitted the most radical proposal.

They want to extend Limerick city and create one Regional Authority comprising of Counties Limerick, Clare and North Tipperary.

The Limerick Leader is claiming that the Brosnan Report will recommend a single authority should govern Limerick City and County.

I personally don’t see how this is going to help tackle the many and varied problems that Limerick City currently faces. By all means amalgamate the pointless and useless county councils in the region. But Limerick City needs it’s own strong governing body given the complexity of the issues down here.

It’s weak and indecisive governance that has got us into the current mess. I was beginning to think that we were finally starting to exhibit an appetite for substantial and meaningful change. But to be honest, this just smacks of yet another cowardly cop out! :rolleyes:

One local authority should govern all of Limerick, Denis Brosnan committee recommends

By Nick Rabbitts

THE large suburbs of Shannon Banks and Westbury in Co Clare are to be recommended for inclusion in a new single local authority covering Limerick city and county, the Limerick Leader understands.

The recommendations of the five-strong Limerick Local Government Committee set up by Minister John Gormley in February and chaired by businessman Denis Brosnan are also believed to include proposals for a directly elected mayor on a five-year term and a reduction in the number of Limerick councillors sitting on the new authority. This would not take effect until the next local elections, due in 2014.

It is is estimated that the group’s proposals would bring cost savings of more than €2m.

In the coming days, Mr Brosnan – also the chairman of the Mid-West jobs task force – is expected to meet Local Government Minister Gormley to discuss its contents after which the report will go to cabinet for approval.

The recommendations of the boundary committee will be more enthusiastically greeted at County Hall than at Limerick City Council.

The submission to the Brosnan committee by the County Council endorsed the idea of one authority for all of Limerick, while City Hall had argued strongly in favour of a major boundary extension taking in Dooradoyle, Raheen and Castletroy, as well as the suburbs currently run by Clare County Council.

Mr Brosnan’s reported suggestion of a unified authority is hardly a surprise to anyone.
Not only is it one of the more obvious ways of dealing with a situation where two
entities have both a competitive and a cooperative relationship, but it is also the
same way in which he has managed such conflicts before.

While MD of Kerry Group, Mr Brosnan dealt with the strains between the usually
separate Sales & Marketing and Production functions by appointing one single
executive director over them both.

Best wait for the report before saying any more.

@KeepAnEyeOnBob wrote:

teak, it would also mean that of Ireland’s cities, Limerick, the third largest (by total urban area), will be without a city authority, merely being run like a town in a county (not even that – don’t some larger towns have a pseudo-council?).

It would in some ways be even worse – essentially Limerick Co. Co. mark II being able to even more milk the entire city for short-term gain to get money to keep county folk sweet.

Would depend on how the new wards were designed. The population balance between urban and rural is virtually 50/50, with about 90,000 people in each.

I think a lot of the reaction has been unnecessarily negative. The boundary of the city will be extended to encompass what is the urban areas of the city and both local authorities will be replaced by a single authority (which to my mind looks more like a reversion to the remit of the old city). My reading of the document leads me to believe that the city and county will have separate area committees similar to those that operate at present in Dublin City council which will deal with the week to week issues that arise. In this way the “on the ground” stuff will be compartmentalised so that cllrs from Newcastle aren’t talking about or have any input into footpaths in Corbally. And while the two beaucracy will remain the scope of the county element will be much reduced to the area outside the city boundary.

A 5 year Mayor, and the expression that the Dublin Mayoral executive could serve as a template for the Mid-West is also beneficial. Let’s face it the 5 year Mayor will be the biggest political role outside being a minister open to anyone outside of the Dublin Mayoralty. I think the 2014 elections should allow the people some say in drawing up the short-list of who could be that Mayor, not a direct election but surely it shouldn’t be down to party horse trading.

I came across this piece by Councillor Diarmuid Scully (Fine Gael) in the September issue of the Limerick Event Guide. It was written prior to the report being released, but it shows that Scully is at least understanding of the problem.

http://www.eightball.ie/onlinemag/ (page 21 of September 2010 issue)

“The Limerick Boundary Committee make their report on
the City/County boundary issue public this month. We
hand the Talking Point over to this issues feature writer, City
Councillor Diarmuid Scully, to discuss……

Later this month the report to John Gormley from the Limerick boundary
committee will be made public. While often presented as a pointless squabble
between local politicians, the issue of the boundary is the single most
important one affecting our city and the decision that the Minister makes will
have enormous implications in terms of jobs, investment and the quality of
all our lives.

The current truncated boundary does immense damage to our city. Half the
population of Limerick city (55,000 out of 110,000) officially live in county
Limerick. This false representation of reality damages our city in three ways:

1 Resources: The full financial resources of the city are not available
to be spent in the city. Every year Limerick County Council takes some €8
million more from the suburbs of the city then it spends there. This money
from the ratepayers of the greater city is used to provide services elsewhere
in rural county Limerick. The net effect of this annual transfer of funds from
urban to rural Limerick is that Limerick County Council is now the richest local
authority in the country, while Limerick city council is the second poorest
(after Donegal). We can see the ill effects of this annual plundering of the
city in our pot-holed roads and footpaths, in our dilapidated housing stock
and in the empty shops on our main city streets.

2 Social dumping: Limerick County Council provides no social
housing in its half of Limerick city. It provides no assistance to the homeless
and no public sports facilities of any kind. By refusing to accept its
responsibilities the county council has engineered a situation where all of the
socially disadvantaged areas in a city of 110,000 are concentrated in a small
geographic area. As a result Limerick is now the most socially divided city
in Ireland.

3 Image: Limerick is a city of 110,000 people. We are the 3rd largest
city in the state. Everyone who lives here knows that, yet every guide to
Ireland from the national census, to Lonely Planet to the CIA factbook claims
that Limerick’s real population is just 55,000 and that we are the 4th largest
city in the state.

Limerick has the youngest population of any city in Ireland and has a higher
proportion of its population in fulltime third level education than anywhere
else in the country, yet officially we have the oldest population in Ireland and
the lowest level of educational attainment. Limerick’s has a moderate crime
problem – we are not the best, we are not the worst. In most years we have
less crime per head of population than Dublin and Waterford but more than
Cork and Galway, yet two national newspapers and one television station
took the crimes committed in the entire city and county (pop. 175,000),
divided them by the official population of the city (55,000) and created their
own figures for Limerick’s crime rate which were more than three times what
the Garda figures later turned out to be. The entirely false claim that Limerick
was the “murder capital of Europe” was based on these dodgy statistics.
The dodgy statistics were only possible because of the boundary.

The image the boundary gives of Limerick is of an old, tired, socially
disadvanaged and crime ridden small town, when in fact we are a young,
vibrant, striving, and safe city. But perception is often more important than
reality. The difficulties we face in attracting tourists, events and jobs to this
city are exacerbated by the negative image – an image that is bound up with
the boundary.

Diarmuid Scully”

Mike, Denis Brosnan accepted that it wasn’t the ideal solution, but the committee had an eye to what Ireland was ‘politically ready’ for, and the jump to a regional authority (which is what he would like to see happen) was too much too soon.

In that light, I think they have come up with something that will ultimately lead towards a regional authority, and it’s the best the Mid-West and Limerick can hope for right now.

@CologneMike wrote:

Denis Brosnan’s Committee recommendation to amalgamate the city and county councils, as well as bringing in the South East Clare suburbs of Westbury and Shannon Banks to a new unitary authority is maybe the second best solution under the task he received from the Department of Environment.

It is very much a compromised recommendation and definitely not the ideal solution for the city. The city of Limerick after years of fragmented administration by three local authorities needs to focus 100 % on itself for the coming decade. It has a lot to correct before it can positively contribute to the Mid-West-Region.

It seems they considered the Limerick County Council (population 85,000) without the suburbs of the city (Raheen, Dooradoyle, Castletroy) was not an appropriate solution. :confused: Oddly enough the North Tipperary County Council can operate with a population of 66,000.

However one would get the impression that he would have preferred to have done a report on the local government of the Mid-West-Region instead.

Local government committee boss Denis Brosnan issues stark warning on jobs in Limerick (Limerick Leader)

Shannon Development wants urgent action on single authority for Limerick (Limerick Leader)

Local politicians express reservations about Denis Brosnan’s proposals for Limerick (Limerick Leader)

I got that impression too, fact is that a lot of the language in the reports mirrors what we were trying to drive at in our submission.

@Dan Sullivan wrote:

I got that impression too, fact is that a lot of the language in the reports mirrors what we were trying to drive at in our submission.

I’m not sure if you were at the launch of the report, Dan? Denis Brosnan said one thing which was very telling. He said if it was up to him, as opposed to the five-member committee, he would have gone for a wider regional authority. It’s something that wasn’t picked up by any of the media, as far as I have seen so far. He said that Ireland is moving that way and it’s only a matter of time.

I chatted with him briefly afterwards and he re-iterated that point about Shannon Airport and the Port being part of the one region and should be effectively governed by one authority.

“Up to 1,000 people” wow what an extraordinary turnout! I saw a clip about this on last nights news, participants dressed in any type of Clare GAA clothing they could get their hands on! 😮

Nonsense like this just serves to reinforce the view that Irish people are far too short sighted and parochial to ever see the greater good.

The hypocrisy of all this is just staggering. These people want to avail of all the services that Limerick City provides yet contribute absolutely nothing to the cost of providing those services. You simply can’t have it both ways and it’s astonishing that this unsustainable situation has been allowed to endure for so long.

I really do hope that whatever Government is in place (provided we actually have a country to govern) will have the courage to finally implement these critical reforms. The time for sidestepping and fudging has long since passed.

Once the ice is broken, we can then move on to hopefully abolishing the various County Councils and establishing a Mid West authority. We might finally be able to develop a viable region then!

Local bragging rights can be decided on the hurling field.