Galway City Council

dollybird2

In my view Galway is a complex and badly designed city. I would imagine (i am not a native) that when the city was developed there was no awareness/consideration/premonition that Galway would amount to the size and capacity that it is/holds today.

There is a lot of criticism of GCC in the public domain. I have to say that, although I have my issues with particular roadworks/resurfacing works, I find GCC very good to deal with. The staff are friendlier and more helpful than other public offices I have dealt with imo.

So overall, do they do a good job for you? And what is your experience in dealing with them?

*The reason I am asking about the City Council only is that, apart from taxing my car, I have never had any dealings with Galway County Council.

dilallio

The staff in the Motor Tax office are indeed excellent and helpful.

I have however recently needed to contact 2 other departments (roads & parks) to complain about a pothole & illegal dumping. I did both by email using the addresses supplied in the GCC website.
Neither dept. bothered even acknowledging or responding to my email, even though I provided my name, address, email, and tel no.

I ended up contacting some city councillors to have the matter dealt with.

I was hoping that as a public service, that at the very least, they would acknowledge queries or complaints.

jkforde

I've always found that I get good service in person and via the ole email. I reckon the key is your attitude in asking.. us Irish in generally react badly to table thumping and tend to cooperate better when we feel empathy for the person seeking help.

Head The Wall

A service that GCC previously provided used to be free and took 5 days to process. This year they decided to slap a charge of €100 on it and increase the time to process it to 10 days. Surely when paying for a service it should be improved on

What is the service? Some like bin collections had to add vat because of competition issues.

Head The Wall

A Permit, it's nothing to do with the VAT issue but purely a revenue raising issue. They couldn't even justify why they were charging for it, if they said they would reduce the wait time down to 2 or 3 days that may have negated the hostility but no they doubled it to 10 days.

The downside to this is we have lost jobs because of it as customers won't wait that long and will get someone in that will do the work illegally without the permit

dilallio

jkforde wrote: »

I've always found that I get good service in person and via the ole email. I reckon the key is your attitude in asking.. us Irish in generally react badly to table thumping and tend to cooperate better when we feel empathy for the person seeking help.

Here is the email I sent the City Council. As you can see, I wasn't 'table-thumping'. It would only take 10 secs for them to hit the reply button and paste in a standard response that they are acknowledging the receipt of the email and will reply in due course. It's not rocket-science.

To: parks@galwaycity.ie
From: <snip>
Subject: Litter in <snip>

Hi,
Some soccer club held a tournament yesterday (31st Aug) in <snip>. After they finished, they left a pile of rubbish / bottles / etc after them on the pitch.
Would it be possible to check if this club had booked the use of the pitch, and if so, ask the club secretary to organise a cleanup?
Many thanks,
<name & contact details snipped>