Tim Lombard (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Leader for his kind interjection. What I was trying to get across was that the hours councillors work while they are going through a county development plan has to be looked at. What they did last week in Cork County Council was absolutely wrong in so many ways. Over a three-day period they sat for 34 hours. On the last day, they sat for 17 hours, from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m., making one of the most important decisions for Cork and its development. When I was a member of Cork County Council in 2007, we started at 9 a.m. and finished at 6.30 a.m. the following morning. We worked for 21.5 hours straight.

The Minister has to intervene and put a regulation in place regarding working hours for councillors. It makes no sense that the most important plan that any local authority brings forward, the county development plan, should be put together by people working those extreme hours. One cannot make coherent decisions if one has been working for 17 hours straight. I have had members of the public on to me about this issue. It is a significant issue for the local authority members who have to work those hours, as well as in terms of the decisions they make. This is something they have five years to work on. It is not emergency legislation. It is not thrown upon them. It can be timed and worked out. The Minister with responsibility for local government has to put a regulation in place so that we do not have these exceptional and extreme working hours.