Is Greystones Being Milked Dry…?

The future’s so bright…

f the rest of Wicklow is to be believed, sure, we’re all fecking Kardashians here in Greystones…

Pigs in chic, rolling in dough, and living life without a care or a bill in the world.

That certainly seems to be the thinking whenever our annual budget comes around in Wicklow County Council.

Despite the fact that we’re the son whose wages are being divided up by ma and pa with the less fortunate siblings in this Wicklow family, again and again, Greystones keeps getting short-changed when it comes to our own pocket money.

Which may explain why our local councillors rejected Wicklow County Council’s latest draft budget last week.

To put some maths behind all this malevolent malarkey, we asked one of those councillors, young Derek Mitchell, to go through the numbing numbers for us…

The Greystones district – which includes Kilcoole and Newcastle – gets €172 per person a year to run the area whereas Bray, a similar urban area, gets €242 and thus has three times the staff. West Wicklow gets €331 each and Arklow and Wicklow Districts about €280.

That’s why services are poor in this area.

The money spent in the area was always small and has not increased in line with the population. Greystones’ constant population growth also increases the spend with roads being dug up frequently. When I complained about this recently, Hollywood Councillor Patsy Glennon (FF) said, “The streets of Greystones are paved with gold!“.

Other local Councillors supported the demand for more money but we have not gotten our numbers changed. This is doubly insulting as the Local Property Tax paid in Greystones is the highest in Wicklow, given that the house prices here are nearly double those in most other areas of Wicklow.

Council officials sent a list of projects to justify an increase in LPT (which was rejected). Analysing this showed hardly any capital money was spent here.

Greystones & Wicklow Districts (including Newtown) are building far more houses than other Wicklow areas, with development levies being paid for each new house. These levies are supposed to fund infrastructure – mostly roads and paths – to support the constant population growth.

However, the west of Wicklow, with no new houses, is allocated ten times more levies than Greystones!

Wicklow, with the same growth as us, is allocated 30 times more capital expenditure.

Large amounts are being spent on the Clermont education facility in Rathnew [including, we’re told, the reported €7m sale of soon-to-be-developed land at Charlesland], which should actually be paid by the Department of Education as it’s not a core service for councils. Also huge amounts of money are to be spent upgrading Wicklow, Arklow and Bray harbours.

Bottom line, Greystones needs a fairer share of the money we’re raising so this cash cow can cope with the constant loss of field after  field and the arrival of yet another 500 new houses.

We’ve highlighted this problem before – and before that – but, given that we’re all spoilt little rich kids here, the WCC song remains the same.