‘Engage your brain before your mouth!’

“You are good craic today!” Cathaoirleach Richard Truell exclaimed after he had to bang the table in the council chamber to restore order at the last meeting of the Ballybay/Clones Municipal District.

He was interjecting in a shouting match between Cllr Sinead Flynn (SF) and Cllr Seán Gilliland (FG) on the public sector strikes.

The row flared up after the public sector strike was mentioned by the meeting’s chair in passing.

“If the Government would listen to the unions!” Cllr Sinéad Flynn quipped. As the Cathaoirleach clapped back: “The unions have to listen to the Government too!”

Fine Gael’s Seán Gilliland said that the unions had been invited to engage with the Government.

Cllr Flynn replied: “We’ll have to agree to disagree, The Government falls short.”

Cllr Gilliland accused Cllr Flynn of having to take “some sort of umbrage” before adding: “Sinn Fein are an all-island party. You can’t speak out of the two sides of your mouth.”

The Sinn Féin representative said that the Government did that all the time.

The Fine Gael man noted that there was a pay agreement in place in the Republic, but that the finance and First Ministers still had “not sorted it out in Northern Ireland”.

Cllr Pat Treanor of Sinn Fein advised Cllr Gilliland that he’d “want to talk to his friends in the DUP”, adding that “workers were on strike because (the Irish Government) wouldn’t let them in”.

The meeting’s chairperson Cllr Truell said: “I was on the picket line myself, and not as a public representative. I wasn’t there to get my photo taken. The unions have had their wings clipped over the years. I hope after today it’ll be sorted.”

Cllr Flynn advised him to “put his council hat on” and he said that he “did do that”.

Cllr Gilliland made the point that Budget 2026 had set aside money for the pay agreements.

Sinn Fein representative Treanor said that his Fine Gael counterpart was “obviously taking the side of the Government, when it was the workers who had to go out on strike”.

Cllr Flynn said that she had never seen “the amount of discontent in the country”, adding that people “can’t afford to put fuel in cars or food on the table.” She also advised Cllr Gilliland to “engage your brain before your mouth”. Gilliland replied that he had.

It was at that point that the Cathaoirleach knocked on the table and brought what he described as a “good discussion” to a close, reiterating: “I was on strike as a HSE worker. Did I want to be there?... The unions aren’t innocent either.”

Further strikes have been deferred pending talks at the Work Relations Commission, although a work to rule continues.