Leading the way in Longford

BY JOANNE CORCORAN

LIFE is never easy when you're a councillor, but for some, it's harder than most. Jimmy McDonnell is a newly-elected Sinn Féin councillor on Longford Town Council and already he has had to stand up to the town's mayor.

"I'm not exactly flavour of the month here at the moment," McDonnell told An Phoblacht this week. "But then I didn't go into the council to be liked."

The fledgling councillor first caused waves last month when he refused to go on a council junket to France.

"We're twinned with a town in France, and the council decided that the councillors should go over to the town to reciprocate a visit made to us by a French delegation during the summer," he says.

"I was asked to go, but when I evaluated the trip, it just looked like a junket. I welcome the idea of twinning, but I suggested that a delegation consisting of relevant community workers and the mayor should travel to France, and said that I did not see the benefit of me going in my capacity as a councillor."

The reception to his stand was not good.

"The meeting following the story breaking in the local papers, was hostile," he says. "The Mayor, a Fine Gael woman named Peggy Nolan, said that she wished that any councillor who declined a foreign trip should just leave it at that, and not go to the press.

"I explained to her that I would go on trips that I believed to be of value to the community, but would not accept invitations to what I considered junkets. At that point the town clerk interrupted me to say that the trip had been mostly paid for through European funding, not the council, but I said that we were all net contributors to that funding."

McDonnell is also trying to deal with some of the many social injustices in Longford Town.

His biggest success has been the passing of a motion concerning the power supply to council houses.

"There are homes here that have been built to rely completely on electricity," he says. "They have no backboiler or anything, people have to rely on expensive ESB storage heaters even for hot water."

He knows of one woman who has had to move out of her house so she can save on ESB bills for a while.

"She is a lone parent and she fell behind on her electricity bill," he says. "Now she's staying with her mother so she doesn't build up any more electricity debts, but she's still paying the rent on the house. There are lots more people in her situation and the fact that the ESB is continuing to raise their prices isn't helping."

His motion called for a survey to take place on the houses to see how much their power supply is costing in comparison to other houses in the town.