Achill councillor slams closure of Mayo beach toilets for bank holiday weekends

MAYO County Council have been accused of not treating rural communities with respect after public toilets at two busy beaches were closed over busy bank holiday weekends.

Achill-based councillor Paul McNamara made the claim at the monthly meeting of the Westport/Belmullet Municipal District after pointing out that toilets at Keem Bay beach and Mulranny beach were not open to the public over the last two bank holiday weekends.

The Fianna Fáil councillor said that €150,000 was spent refurbishing the Keem Bay toilets but they were closed for the Easter holidays while people using Mulranny beach at the May Bank Holiday weekend had to ask local people to use their home toilet because the public toilets were closed.

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“Why those toilets cannot be open I do not know. Keem Bay is at the very end of the island and anyone in that vicinity and has to go to the toilet has to go behind a wall or jump a ditch. That was the reality of it because there is no public place near Keem Bay. The amount of people who were in Keem Bay and no toilets open is absolutely ridiculous.

“Last weekend it was a struggle to get the Mulranny toilets open and when we got them open I got calls during the week to say they are locked again. We opened Mulranny for the May Bank Holiday weekend and decided to lock them up again during the best week of weather that has come all year.

“I acknowledge they are open now but that is after me shouting and roaring and a load of other people complaining about the mess left behind the toilers. It was the same in Mulranny this week. I was sent pictures and you can just imagine what they were like,” he said.

No funding available

SEAMUS Ó Mongáin, Head of the Municipal District explained that keeping the toilets open for longer ‘requires significant funding’ and the council do not have the funding available to do that.

However, Cllr McNamara pointed out that public toilets in urban towns are open all year round and questioned why funding was available for those toilets and not for rural areas.

“If the council budgets are so tight that the public toilets in the rural areas cannot be opened then it is an absolute disgrace. I bet the public toilets in all the towns were not locked and that is my problem on how the rural areas are treated differently from the urban towns. As a local representative I cannot stand for it anymore, we have to be treated the same.

“We bring this to your attention all the time. There are some areas where the buildings [toilets] are there and they should be in use and opened to the public. Open them the same as the urban towns,” he said.

Cllr McNamara was supported by other councillors in the area who pointed out that there was a lack of toilet facilities in beaches around the county.

One public toilet

WESTPORT-based councillor Peter Flynn told the meeting that he did not want the impression that there were loads of facilities in Westport and pointed out that there is one public toilet in a car park which has to be paid for.

“We need to be careful not to get into an urban rural debate here because the real debate is the lack of public facilities right around the county at critical times of the year. We need to deal with the reality that like everything in the municipal districts we are under funded and under resourced,” he said.