Dominic Hannigan's blog

The Local Area Councillors met this week for a presentation on the Beach By-laws from a representative of the Beach Advisory Committee. A lot of effort has gone into reviewing the draft byelaws, and now the committee has come back with some proposed improvements. The view from the Councillors was that the officials should seek to take these on-board before publishing the final bye-laws. After all, that's why we set up the advisory committee in the first place.

On Friday I headed down to Galway for the Tom Johnson Summer School. The topic for the weekend was "Where next for the Left". About 150 attended the weekend in the Menlo Park Hotel. In attendance were about half of the Parliamentary Party, including Pat R, Eamon G, Michael D, Jan O'Sullivan, Willie Penrose, Tommy Broughan, Joanna Tuffy and Ciaran Lynch. I spoke on Migration on Sunday morning. Although the session started at 11 the room was quite full. Generally Sunday morning's events are the ones that see fewer attendees, because of the night before.


Henry Upton, George Cummins, James Heffernan and Alan Kelly at the Summer School

I also had a chat with Jeremy Corbyn MP, who was speaking at one of the sessions in the afternoon. Jeremy was my MP when I lived in Islington and I'd attended events he had spoken at in the past. It was good to hear him speak again.

The weekend was great fun. Although we've just had a poor performance in the general election the mood was very "can do" and upbeat. There's lots of work to be done, but there's a hell of a lot of talent and energy in the party.