[ Cork City Council - Annual Report 2020 ]
Lord Mayor Cllr Joe Kavanagh
Ann Doherty Chief Executive
Message from Lord Mayor & Chief Executive If 2019 was a significant year in the evolution of Cork City Council, with the addition of 85,000 citizens and seeing the geographical area increase by fivefold, then 2020 was no less momentous, though for markedly different reasons. The first lockdown of 2020, which followed the official announcement of a global COVID -19 pandemic, saw city council staff continue to deliver essential public services like fire services, water services, housing and homelessness services, traffic systems, street cleansing and the maintenance of our public parks and green spaces. A number of our non-essential staff were redeployed to support the then fledgling contact tracing service. Scores more donned high vis’ vests and became our award-winning social distancing park rangers – supporting people who relied on our parks and green spaces like never before as we all adjusted to the notion of keeping two metres apart.
Response Forum (CRF) which proved to be a lifeline for some of the most vulnerable in the community and best practice in inter-agency collaboration. We worked with homeless services, Meals on Wheels, the HSE, the Education Training Board, community gardai, the GAA and groups like Friendly Call to support cocooners and any vulnerable person who needed help during lockdown. In the following weeks and months, we also saw a rapid deployment of a wide range of online services which again helped to reduce the numbers needing to visit public counters at City Hall and allowed us to hold councillor briefings and eventually full council meetings online. We were able to hold a largely online public consultation around the Cork City Development Plan 2022-2028. Across the city and country, arts and cultural events moved online with Glow – A Christmas Celebration – becoming a socially- distanced walking trail. We had many plans to mark the year 2020 as a year of commemoration, 100 years on from the Burning of Cork when the city centre, the City Hall and the adjacent Carnegie Library were destroyed in a night of infamy. However, these atrocities visited on the citizenry and businesses only served to bolster the resolve of the community of the city to pull itself from the ashes and rebuild.
Within two hours of a Ministerial order, Cork City Council also set up its COVID-19 Community
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