Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)

Did the emergency response committee discuss whether the ability of local authorities to deal with the flooding and the freeze was impaired by the ban on local authority recruitment? Local authority workers are already under pressure because of the jobs embargo, pay cuts and, in many cases, overtime bans. Last April, the local authority professional officers branch of SIPTU stated that the overtime ban and recruitment embargo would potentially have a devastating impact on professional engineers and other local authority employees engaged in the production and distribution of drinking water and protection of existing water quality. We saw an indication of this during the emergency. The branch also pointed out that temporary engineers were let go due to the ban on renewing temporary contracts.

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