Councillors refuse to adopt ‘incomplete version’ of development plan meeting minutes

Cllrs have also requested a hard copy of the minutes of the meetings and also additional material said to include notices of motion presented from the floor at the CDP meetings

Should tape recordings of Meath County Council meetings held to discuss a proposed new county development plan be destroyed after the new plan is introduced later this year, or be kept intact by the council?

That was one of the questions posed by a number of councillors who are now trying to have the recordings kept as a more accurate record of the more than 80 hours of discussions on the plan since last November.

Nine councillors attached to a technical grouping on the council have asked for the audio and video recording of the county plan meetings to be supplied to each member.

They have also requested a hard copy of the minutes of the meetings and also additional material said to include notices of motion presented from the floor at the CDP meetings. Cllr Fitzgerald said he could not see a problem in providing councillors with the recordings on a disc.

These requests have been submitted to the council executive and a reply is awaited. Labour Cllr Elaine McGinty has separately submitted queries about the recordings. In addition to Cllr Fitzgerald, the technical group includes Cllrs Emer Tóibín, Gillian Toole, Elaine McGinty, Nick Killian, Trevor Golden, Francis Deane, Amanda Smith and Geraldine Keogan.

At the April meeting of the council, officials said that the recordings were an ‘aide memoire’ to compiling the minutes of the meeting and the intention would be to dispose of the tapes following the completion of the development plan in Autumn this year.

Speaking at the April meeting, Cllr Fitzgerald said that the technical group would not agree to any restrictions on the availability of the recordings. He added that he sincerely hoped that councillors would not be forced to apply under Freedom of Information legislation for access to the material “as it would be a sad day for the democratic process of this council and would send out a message that appears we have something to hide”.

Independent Cllr Nick Killian said that notices of motion on the development plan should have been included – these were not included in the addendum to the minutes. If they were talking in openness and transparency then these should be included.

Councillors were reminded by officials that last year they had agreed that recordings of the development plan meetings should be kept for a certain period of time and then destroyed but several councillors said they had changed their minds on this issue.

Fine Gael Cllr Noel French said that he did not think that the minutes were complete. He had never had a problem with minutes of council meetings but in this case he found that notices of motion from the floor had not been included in the minutes. He would like to see matters that were under discussion included in the minutes. Independent Cllr Gillian Toole said she had concerns over six-seven omissions or inaccuracies in the minutes.

The Fianna Fail grouping, through its whip Cllr Damien O’Reilly, said they were happy to accept the minutes as presented. Cllr McGinty said the minutes should reflect the amount of work put into discussing the draft plan.

Chief Executive Jackie Maguire said that she had some concerns that members might think the executive was writing the minutes to serve its own requirements. The act was that there were 2,700 submissions on the proposed plan, along with 190 notices of motion and 109 notices of motion from the floor. She said that the motions from the floor had been included in the document contrary to what had been said.

If members wanted all notices of motion included then the minutes would have been a very voluminous document, she said. The minutes of the meetings were a record of decisions made and did not go into deep conversations. The tapes would be retained until the entire development plan was completed later this year. The recordings were an 'aide memoire' in compiling the minutes but not the minutes themselves.

The council’s legal advisor Rory McEntee said the minutes were meant to be a record of decisions taken but not a record of everyone’s contribution to debate.

A council official said that the minutes ended up at 500 pages. If notices of motion had to be included, the minutes could run to 1,000 pages. Following the raising of further queries about the minutes, including freedom of information and data protection legislation, the council voted by 29 votes to three to defer the discussion to the May meeting of the council, scheduled for 10th May.