Whelan changes his mind on resignation

Long serving town councillor Pat Whelan has thrown his hat back into the ring after he decided that he no longer wanted to tender his resignation from Mullingar"s ruling body.Mr Whelan said that a month ago he had become disillusioned with the lack of funding available in the new budgets and that he had become overburdened with work projects having just embarked on a new course of study.'When I realised how little money there would be I didn"t want to have to be the person to tell people that there was no money for this and for that. I am a business man myself and I know how things are,' said councillor Whelan.'But over the last few weeks I have been amazed at the amount of support I have had and how many people have come to me and said that I should give this a second chance.'Enda Kenny asked me to give it a second chance the minute I wanted to resign but I said no, however since that time a number of factors have caused me to change my mind.Continued from front page'In the last two weeks I have employed two excellent staff who are more than capable of running my business while I am not there.I am also the only Fine Gael town councillor to run a constituency office in the town and if I pulled out people wouldn"t have that any more.'Councillor Whelan"s decision to rethink his resignation does have however some wider implications in that the electoral candidates had already been chosen after he had decided to leave the town council.Fine Gael head office will now have to decide if they should run five candidates including councillor Whelan or cut back to the three originally planned before Councillor Whelan took his name from the hat.'I would take nothing for granted,' he said. 'The decision is entirely up to head office but I am hoping that my long service will stand me in good stead'.