Council ‘has 69 unfilled job roles’

Westmeath County Council has 69 job vacancies at the moment, although the figure varies from day to day and week to week, councillors learned at their July monthly meeting held in Mullingar last week.

Some of the positions have been unfilled for as long as 18 months.

The query on staff numbers was raised by Cllr John Dolan, who asked what number of vacancies the council is currently trying to fill. CEO Barry Kehoe said that the figure was approximately 70.

“We've been recruiting continuously,” Mr Kehoe said.

“Over the last three months, I've agreed to put additional resources into HR for recruitment, in order to speed up the recruitment of staff and hopefully, we'll see the impact of that before the end of the year because it is critical that we backfill vacancies as quickly as we can.”

Mr Kehoe went on to say that a number of those vacancies required input from the department in terms of sanction and also from the public recruitment service. He pointed out that there are processes that have to be followed when recruiting for senior positions such as executives and engineers.

That, he said, made the process quite slow because competitions had to be run, panels constituted then pre-clearance obtained and successful candidates have to work out their notice before they can take up a position.