PORTLAOISE:FOR A whole hectic year he was probably the most famous Irish mayor since Tomás Mac Curtain, the mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in 1920. As mayor of Portlaoise from June 2007 to June 2008, Nigerian-born Rotimi Adebari gave 500 interviews, most of them to foreign media, attended around 200 functions and made several trips abroad.
Feted as the multicultural face of what was once one of the most homogenous countries in the world, the demands on the time of Cllr Adebari went far beyond what one would expect of the mayor of a mid-sized provincial town.
“Halfway through that year I was counting how many days I had left. My finances were so badly affected.” Cllr Adebari said he probably did too much, but felt a responsibility as Ireland’s first black mayor to promote both Portlaoise and multiculturalism.
Such were the demands of being the first black mayor of an Irish town that his day job as chief executive of Optimum Point Consultancy, an organisation that specialises in cross-cultural training, suffered, as did the other sinecures, including a part-time lecturer in DCU.
For the whole of the year he was feted as a symbol of a transformed Ireland, he said his consultancy earned him less than €10,000. His only other income was his salary of €350 a month as a town councillor and his annual salary as mayor of €1,400.
Unfortunately, the end of his tenure of mayor coincided with the start of a severe recession and Cllr Adebari, who has a wife and four children of schoolgoing age, has taken other paid work to augment his consultancy business.
Undeterred though, he is looking for re-election to Portlaoise Town Council and also to the county council. “I don’t regret it at all. I can look back and say it was a memorable year,” he said, repeating the phrase that he often uses on the campaign trail that his generation of immigrants will plant the tree so future generations can enjoy the shade.
When he first ran in 2004, he described himself as “the reality of our future”. That reality was apparent on the doorsteps too. In the course of canvassing the Forest Park estate, he encountered Croatian, Slovakian, Polish, Pakistan, Romanian, Nigerian and Turkish households.
Cllr Adebari concedes he will do well to win both seats, though he should retain his town council seat. To be elected to both, he will have to more than double the 400 votes he got in 2004 in the county council election. “We all have to leave something and give something back to our communities, not just pass through.”
