A training and briefing day for the newly elected mayors and chairs of the country's 34 city and county councils is to be held in Athlone on Wednesday. "Gone are the days when the job involved presiding over meetings and cutting a few tapes," says Liam Kenny, director of the General Council of County Councils, organisers of the event. "The chair is now the public face at home and abroad of a county and we are providing training to meet the intense expectation of the role."
The Local Government Bill, minus the dual mandate clause, was signed into law by the President, Mrs McAleese last Saturday, and one of its major provisions is the introduction of directly elected mayors for terms of five years, from 2004. Legal difficulties prevented the inclusion of a clause restricting the role to those with five years' service on a local authority, a measure councillors wanted in order to exclude celebrity and one-issue candidates.
Inter-party pacts to fill the chair with different councillors for each year of the five-year local authority term will thus be a thing of the past, so the changeover at the beginning of the month, which produced 23 FF chairs, six FG, two PD, two Labour and one Independent, will vanish.
Will the advent of directly elected mayors - and chairs of county councils will get the title too - throw up Jeffrey Archer-type candidates here? That remains to be seen. Anyone can stand and some long-serving politicians fear not only that a celebrity might sweep them aside, but also that the directly elected mayor will have a higher profile and greater clout in a county than any local cabinet minister. Some fear that in big cities such a mayor could outshine even the Taoiseach of the day.