Website to be discussed

Council to discuss closure of website

Michael Duffy

STANDING orders are to be suspended at this Thursday night’s meeting of Castlebar Town Council so councillors can discuss the recent decision taken by the moderators of castlebar.ie to close down the website.
The website has, in the last number of days, come on stream again and the public can access certain areas but the bulletin boards which provided most of the traffic for the website have yet to re-appear due to what moderators called ‘a threat of legal action’ from a local free-sheet in the county town.
The legal threat came from the free-sheet after its editor took offence at postings which referred to a lead article in the free-sheet and Cllr Noel Campbell told The Mayo News yesterday (Monday) that he had proposed that standing orders be suspended in order to ‘draw a line in the sand’ in relation to all matters.
“The Mayor has told me he will second my motion to suspend standing orders. My main reason for wanting the suspension is so we, as councillors, can make our views known. I also want to find out what role, if any, Castlebar Town Council or Mayo County Council have in castlebar.ie. The website was used by thousands of people from the town and further afield and we, as elected representatives, must try and ensure that it is up and running again in the near future,” said Cllr Campbell, who added he thought it was likely that the councillors would also discuss the content of the article in the free-sheet which caused the legal threat to be issued in the first place.
A campaign has also started on a website, www.savecastlebarie.org, to have the website re-instated. Over 100 people have signed the petition, with people from as far away as Brooklyn and Texas in the USA, Calgary in Canada and Perth in Australia signing.