Councillor calls for hedge-cutting budget to be doubled

Anton McNulty

A WEST Mayo councillor has called on Mayo County Council to double their hedgecutting budget for 2019, saying that the problem is getting worse every year.
Independent councillor Michael Holmes expressed his frustration at a recent West Mayo Municipal District meeting that the trees growing out on the county’s roads were now a major health and safety problem, which needed to be urgently addressed.
Last year, €100,000 was allocated for hedgecutting in Mayo County Council’s annual budget and Cllr Holmes called on the council to find the money to double the funding ahead of the 2019 budget.
“Take it [funding] out of somewhere because that is causing severe hardship for the ordinary people who we represent in rural Mayo. It is worse than that, it is a danger to life and limb and we all know that. I will be asking that in the interest of health and safety that the budget be doubled,” he said.
The Tiernaur-based councillor said that if councillors raise another €100,000 out of their ‘notice of motion’ money, it will cover 40 percent of the county’s roads and this he said will be ‘a major improvement’.
“It is a small amount of money really,” he claimed. “It is an absolute disgrace and getting worse and I am blue in the face talking about it for 15 years almost.”

LIS funding
Meanwhile, the allocation of €512,000 in LIS funding from the Department of Community and Rural Development for the West Mayo Municipal District has been welcomed. The allocation for the district is over half of the total of €980,000 allocated for the entire county.
Despite the large allocation, Kieran Lynn engineer for Mayo County Council, said it will not cover all the applications made in the district and he will be in contact with the councillors to agree a programme. He said they had not received notice from the department for when the work must be completed but hoped they will have until after the New Year to do it.