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Kilkenny County Council chair warns tough decisions will have to be made

Public representatives meet this week to look at ways to tackle the local authority huge budget deficit

Kilkenny County Council is meeting this week to begin tackling the huge budget deficit caused by the coronavirus crisis.

It was reported at the local authority’s monthly meeting in July that they have accrued a debt over €8,000,000.

Councillors are convening in the Watergate Theatre tomorrow (Wednesday) to discuss the repercussions of this.

They were originally set to convene yesterday, but the meeting was adjourned after the death of Cllr David Fitzgerald’s mother.

Cathaoirleach Andrew McGuiness says “Wednesday is going to be a tough meeting, actually I believe that nearly all of our meetings for the foreseeable 12 months are going to be tough because of the huge amount of problems that this pandemic has presented to us all, you know we have a huge amount of debt now as a local authority, well into the millions, there may not be projects that we’d be able to finish this year, that we might have planned to finish this year, we might have to reduce funding in certain areas, a lot of tough decisions are going to have to be made”.