Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

During the six years for which I was a member of Limerick City and County Council, I had the pleasure of working with some very good councillors. What let things down was that we lost two young female councillors and one male councillor who found it impossible to continue in their roles, because of the amount of work involved, while trying to support themselves. Some of them had families and some not but they were very good councillors, exceptional in their work. The way things were going, it seemed that they could not support themselves or their families. It was like it was a retirement stop for an awful lot of people on the councils, with the pay and conditions they were on. Councillors do Trojan work. As the Minister of State said, the first person somebody will contact is the local representative, no matter what party they represent. The workload involved is absolutely huge and I hope the report will reflect that.

The general scheme states that the mayor will have the power to convene a rural board to devise a programme of measures to support rural Limerick and to examine all aspects of rural life. I hope that rural areas will not be left behind urban ones. We saw that recently with the Land Development Agency whereby all the investment was going into the cities rather than into rural areas.

I am from rural County Limerick. It is a fantastic place to live. If it got investment, it would be a fantastic place for other people to live too, for families to be reared in and for people who left our shores to work in other places to come home to. The bottom line in this is Limerick will have its own mayor. Will we have our own "Project Limerick 2040" or are we only implementing Project Ireland 2040? Will our mayor have functions such that we can actually come up with our own project Limerick 2040 and work it around the structures in the city and county? Every county is different and I would like to think the mayoral function that will be in County Limerick will represent County Limerick as a whole and not Ireland as a whole, especially where infrastructure and rural areas are concerned. I hope that would also be reflected in the city areas.

This is my final question. A person running for mayor must be over 18 years of age and a resident of the State and must get either 60 nominations from councillors or pay €1,000 to run. Is that correct?