Action over alleged council gerrymandering can proceed

A Connemara-based community organisation's action over alleged gerrymandering in Galway County Council's voting process in choosing a provider of certain services can proceed, the High Court has ruled.

Forum Connemara Ltd, which has been involved in programmes to tackle rural decline and peripherality since 1990, wants the court to quash a decision that there should be only one provider of community development services for all of Co Galway under a contract worth more than €1 million.

It claims there should be a separate provider for west Galway and the Aran Islands as they are quite different from the rest of the county, for reasons including Irish being the mother-tongue in these regions.

Forum Connemara says that it has lost out in the tender for distribution of government funds for community work as a result of the decision.

It says local knowledge, experience, efficiencies and know-how will be irretrievably lost if the decision stands.

Mr Justice Max Barrett ruled that Forum Connemara's challenge to the the decision should be allowed proceed, despite objections from a Galway County Council committee that the case was brought after the tender process was completed.

The Galway County Local Community Development Committee (LCDC) claimed that, if it was allowed proceed, the case would be a collateral attack on the legitimate public procurement process.

The LCDC said that the case would open a Pandora’s Box in which “all manner of miseries” would be visited on contracting authorities in the form of challenges to their decisions.

‘Gerrymandering’

The judge said the allegations raised by Forum Connemara were, in effect, that the county council had gerrymandered a voting process, ostensibly in the name of good corporate governance, so as to secure a pre-determined end.

The judge said that this related to a meeting of local interest groups, politicians and officials, which eight members of the LCDC were required to leave on the basis of the committee’s own conflicts of interest policy.

As a result, a vote was passed at the meeting by the remaining five committee members, by four votes to one, that there would only be one provider of the service following public tenders.

There were objections from politicians and the public to the decision, including at a meeting in Maam Cross attended by hundreds of people.

The judge said that Forum Connemara’s contention was the decision was wrong and that it sat badly with an assurance allegedly given to it by a Department of Environment official that there would have to be more than one service provider.

The judge rejected the LCDC’s claim that Forum Connemara was trying to “have its cake and eat it” by going through the tender process, being unsuccessful, and then bringing a legal challenge.

The judge refused to grant LCDC an order striking out the proceedings.