Local Government (Support for Elected Members) Bill 2024: Second Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-10
============================================================

Sarah O'Reilly (AON), Agricultural Panel

I thank Senator Kyne for sharing his time with me. I am pleased to speak in support of the Bill to provide secretarial support to councillors. Councillors do a huge amount of work with little support. It is unfair to them and unfair to the communities they represent. There is a huge amount of unseen work and the financial remuneration does not reflect the hours they actually work. The Moorhead report does not consider that a councillor's job is a full-time job. It is a full-time job. It is 24-7, including weekends, Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. Councillors work every single day. I was a councillor for ten years and I was called on Christmas Day and Easter Sunday.
We know that local government is the closest form of government to the people. They are the ones with the finger on the pulse. In many cases, councillors are the first called when there is flooding on a road, when a planning issue goes wrong, when a family is at risk of homelessness, when a community group needs help navigating a 100-page form or, indeed, when there is a storm. On occasion, people called me because they were in a seriously bad way with their mental health and needed emergency help. I know from speaking to other councillors that this was not unique to me. It is not just an administrative service that councillors provide but triage for anyone in need. They are on the front line.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-12-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:26+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-10