Vote blocks expenses payments to councillors

A landmark City Hall vote has blocked the payment of conference and travel expenses to several Cork councillors.

Among the payments shot down was the fee to cover the attendance by Labour’s Michael Ahern — who is not contesting May’s local election — at a seminar entitled ‘Five-Week Countdown to Local Elections 2014’ at the Silver Tassie Hotel in Letterkenny, Co Donegal, from April 18-20.

For the first time in the lifetime of this council, councillors voted against approving this, and three other payments to councillors who either had or were due to attend other conferences.

Fine Gael, Labour, and Fianna Fáil normally have enough members in the council chamber to win a vote on the payments, which is called at the end of every city council meeting.

However, several members of these parties had left the meeting early on Monday to canvass.

This meant that when the expenses vote was called, main-party councillors did not have the numbers to win. City officials cannot make the payments, which at this week’s meeting totalled a few hundred euro combined, without council approval.

Sinn Féin, which opposed the payments and which has always forced a vote on the issue, hailed the vote as a “symbolic victory”.

The party’s leader on the council, Chris O’Leary, has been calling for reform of the council’s conference expenses regime since 2002.

“We now have about 10 to 12 people voting regularly against conference expenses,” he said. “I saw the panic in people’s faces on Monday. They were running around looking to see if they could bring people in from outside the chamber. There was nobody there.”

However, it is understood the payments denied on Monday can be brought forward to the next meeting — the last before local elections — for approval.