Michael McCarthy (Cork South West, Labour)
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There are many good initiatives in some town councils supporting tidy towns, floral competitions and so on. Some of the town councils allocated a small amount of money in the overall scheme of things, but a very significant amount of money to support projects and awards like these. With the abolition of town councils, what happens in towns where they did have the reliance on local government in the form of town councils to support the projects? What will happen when it is subsumed into the full council? We must be realistic. When the town councils are gone and they are part of the full council with a lot of other stuff going on is there any commitment or structure in place to ensure that in areas where one had good local councils doing that kind of work that it would be continued? Is the system being structured that way or is it up to the individual elected members to try to pull that along as part of the legacy as they go into a municipal district?