Pay parking for Co Cork towns as urban councils abolished

Pay parking could be introduced in some Co Cork towns and abolished in others as new municipal districts are scheduled to replace town councils in June.

Councillors elected to the municipal districts in the forthcoming local elections will have the powers to decide on pay parking, a meeting in County Hall was told yesterday.

Acting county manager Declan Daly said municipal districts could get a percentage of pay parking profits to use for local improvement works. However, a number of councillors said they would never vote for the introduction of pay parking, especially in West Cork.

An often-heated debate followed as Fianna Fáil pair Christopher O’Sullivan and Donal O’Rourke said they were vehemently opposed to introducing pay parking in Skibbereen, Clonakilty, and Bantry and demanded that their views were put on record.

Mr O’Sullivan said that councillors were merely expressing the feelings of the people of those three towns in advance of any decision being made by members of the new municipal districts.

“There’s a huge commercial aspect to this; pay parking discourages people from going into towns,” he said and pointed out Clonakilty Chamber of Commerce had recently written to county council officials informing them of this opinion.

“There is an argument that it [pay parking] will be a cash cow. But if businesses close we, the council, will lose money from rates.”

Fine Gael councillor John O’Sullivan said he was not in favour of pay parking either, especially as the county council had approved planning for out-of-town stores which had free parking.

“Introducing pay parking in towns will be detrimental to high street businesses and it will put them at a disadvantage compared with free parking out-of-town shopping centres,” he said.

Labour councillor Ronan Sheehan said Mallow introduced pay parking years ago and it used a large bulk of the profits to subsidise ratepayers.

Mallow has the lowest rates in the county, but that is about to change as plans are in place to provide equal rates countywide.

Mr Sheehan said, as ratepayers would foot a larger bill in his town it was only right to withdraw payparking to encourage people to support their businesses.

Fine Gael councillor Adrian Healy said he was a member of Skibbereen Town Council for the past 12 years, and pay parking was never discussed. He did not expected that to change when the municipal districts were formed, he added.