Council Affairs: Think, breathe, speak

You are accountable, so take ownership of the words that come out of your very own gobs, writes satirical columnist Sean Mellor.

Councillors, if ye are going to say something inappropriate at a local authority meeting or during an interview, don’t get amnesia afterwards and blame the local press for putting words in your mouths. We’ve had this pep talk before.

This is an age-old political ploy that the masters of dark arts down in Merchant’s Quay, and everywhere else, are well versed in. And if I have said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times — you really couldn’t be up to them !

Breathe, count to 10, and if the urge to say something you probably shouldn’t say still lingers, storm out of the chamber like Elizabeth Taylor being one-upped by a princess at a Beverly Hills dinner party. A bout of memory loss after the fact, and then blaming a poor auld peasant hack, is a bad look.

If you said it, own it. Before you cross that lexicon, think!

You are accountable, so take ownership of the words that come out of your very own gobs.

Even on slow news days, we’re really not in the business of making things up. Once those words leave the mouths of our forgetful elected representatives at often spirited public meetings, it becomes fodder for tomorrow’s chip paper. But, guess what?

The words that leave your mouths were not implanted there by hungry reporters to begin with in a moment of madness. Much of the time we are as dumbfounded as you will be after the fact when your temperature has dropped and you are reading all about your own silliness in the pages of the Limerick Post .

Now you know how we feel while covering some of these totally confounding confabs. Sure, I understand it must be confusing for you to realise that you have said something that you shouldn’t have said or behaved in a way that is totally unbecoming.

Lost in the fervour of those euphoric soapbox moments, you can lose the complete run of yourselves, like an unruly mob of third level students gutting a six-bedroom house. It’s all a bit of craic in the heat of the moment and bugger the consequences!

Yet, here we are again, with Cllr Ursula Gavan and my good self having to lecture ye on what’s appropriate and what’s frowned upon at Limerick City and How’s Your Father shindigs.

Remember, it’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.