Cork boundary proposal ‘a reverse takeover of county by the city’

The man who chaired the controversial and shelved Cork super-council report has branded the expert advisory group’s boundary extension report a “cobbled together work of fiction”.

In an attack on the outcome of the review group, chaired by the former chief planner for Scotland, Jim Mackinnon, business consultant Alf Smiddy said: “The report is presented as a compromise solution but in fact it has all the hallmarks of cobbled together, unstructured reverse takeover of the county by the city.

“What they are recommending is not, in fact, a city boundary extension at all, and actually when you read between the lines it goes well beyond a merger of both councils.