Meet the council crews working in all weathers to keep a busy tourist town ticking
For John O’Meara, spring in Tipperary doesn’t mean slowing down — it marks the start of one of the busiest times of the year.
John is one of the general support supervisors (GSS) working within Tipperary County Council’s outdoor staff, and is based in Cahir. Speaking to the Irish Independent, John said that no two days in the job are the same, and the work they do is highly weather-dependent.
"We’ve kind of progressed from having bigger crews in our own yards to having more contractors coming in to do the likes of footpath works, tarmacadam works, all that kind of stuff, so the working day has changed,” he said. “Over the last eight to 10 years, it’s become more practical to bring in contractors to carry out works.”
According to John, this has been a positive move as it means jobs can get done quicker and to a higher standard because specialist crews are employed for each job.
"They’re more set up to do something and can probably get through it quicker, and price-wise, it’s probably cheaper to work that way as well. It reduces the risk as well, you’re using them, they’re using their own insurance and traffic management plans,” he explained.
John has been with Tipperary County Council for just over 40 years, and followed in his father’s footsteps, who was a road overseer for 46 years before him.
For John, the day starts at 8am with a chat with all the crews to let them know what they’re doing for the day.
"We’ll be doing anything from repairing roads after bad weather, drainage works, clearing drains in a town, opening gullies and cleaning them, and then general litter picking.
"Cahir being a tourist town, and a heritage town, we need to keep it clean so there’s grass cutting, but it’s very seasonal, it’s very seasonally driven,” he said.
"At this time of the year now, we’re starting to cut grass, do flower beds, hanging baskets, getting street furniture painted and all that. It’s basically trying to keep the town aesthetically pleasing and nice for tourists and locals.”
"Footfall last year and the year before for tourists in Cahir was higher than Cashel, believe it or not, so we must be doing something right,” he said.
John’s remit includes Cahir town, the surrounding national roads, and smaller local routes.
"We would have a lot of housing estates, and it’s pretty big with the heritage around the place, so I have Cahir town, and then outside the town I have about a five mile radius outside the town of national roads and country and tertiary roads, which would be lesser roads into smaller farms, so you would have the maintenance of all that as well,” John said.
The outdoor staff also keep an eye on hedgecutting, and which hedgerows along the roads need to be cut back when the season allows, as well as keeping an eye on ash dieback along the main roads.
Throughout his 40-year career, John said he has worked in nearly every department within the outdoor staff, from caretaking buildings to working on the back of bin trucks, before bin services were taken out of the council’s remit.
"I gave years on machinery, I gave years on tar, spraying roads and working on general main roads and all that, but I like to have the town looking good, I like to promote it well.
"I have a good crew of lads here, we’re all on the one wavelength. It’s nice when you get a bit of feedback to say that you’re doing something right, because Cahir is coming up on the silver now for the Tidy Towns awards. We’ve been on bronze in the awards for a number of years,” he said.
"The Green Flag Awards is another one, we’re on our fifth green flag this year for the Inch Field, so when you see things coming back and different ideas and new projects it’s great.”
Among John’s favourite parts of the job are working with community groups in his town such as men’s sheds and local residents committees, doing what he can to make Cahir a nicer place to live and work.
He was also involved in sprucing up the town for the visit of now-King Charles and Camilla, helping to put Cahir on the map as an international tourist destination.
John says that it’s nice to see his work tie into some other jobs that are going on in the town to make it more pleasant for both tourists and locals alike, including the multi-million euro new library project.
"We’re relocating the library into an old granary building and the building that the library was in is being made into an IT centre. We knocked an old hotel that’s going to become a 72 space car park. It’s nice to see work getting done and contractors in,” he said.
"When you see the overall picture coming together, it’s nice to see that too,” he added.
While the outdoor crews work mainly from 8am to 4.30pm, John said they also have an on-call rotation for any urgent jobs that may arise outside of business hours.
"A rotation of crews, three men, deal with out of hours calls, so you could have anything from dead animals, to road crashes. We recently had a cave-in of a road,” he said.
“A lot of people don’t realise we do that, and think we just work from 8am to 4.30pm. The public have a perception of us as being the guys who fix the roads or look after the footpaths or cut the grass, and maintain the parks and rivers and life buoys and all that kind of thing."
The on-call hours see crews work from 4.30pm to 10am the following morning.
John said that the outdoor staff also help out with various festivals across the towns and villages, including St Patrick’s Day, Halloween, Easter, and the many festivals that are held around Cahir Castle.
The move to more contractor-focused work allows the council crews to devote their full attention to the jobs they do, rather than crews having to be split up to go off on different jobs, John explained.
"It probably gives the county council the scope to have more crews. Even with a full complement of men here in the yard, we still wouldn’t have the amount of machine operators and truck drivers and all that, but a contractor can come in and his sole job will be to get ready and fit footpaths and drainage works or whatever, whereas we still have morning work like emptying bins, toilet works and cutting grass.
"I couldn’t put a full complement of men into a footpath job, whereas a contractor can. He can come in, start and finish, do his own traffic control. So the job changes when a contractor comes in. He’s just dealing with one specific thing whereas we deal with maybe 10 or 12 different things in the day,” John said.
“I hate to see some of the jobs go to outside contractors, but there are situations where we wouldn’t have the men,” he added.
Over the years, as smaller crews have become the norm, John said some comeraderie has been lost.
"Years back, a crew would be doing footpaths and you’d meet up every morning, you’d have the craic. You knew everyone, you knew all their kids and you were talking about whatever during the day, but now our workforce is smaller and you don’t have that kind of thing.
"You’d have crews of two or three working together one day, and there might only be three one-person jobs the next day,” he explained.
John says that the hardest part of his job is keeping on top of all the health and safety regulations, but added that this is also a very important element.
"Safety-wise, records of safety, everything down to equipment, training schedules, machine tickets, operating tickets, safe pass tickets. At the minute there’s a lot more issues of safety, which is a good thing.
"There’s a lot more training, there’s a lot more hours given to that kind of stuff. Record keeping is important,” he said.
“We recently had a National Standards Authority of Ireland (NSAI) audit, and the amount of paperwork, apart from electronic records, and the upkeep of everything has to be kept right."
As well as safety and making sure Cahir looks its best, John said that during the winter, he’s involved with the council’s road salting programme.
"We take it on for six months of the year, myself and another lad supervise every second week. You have to get out of bed at 2am or 3am and you might have to do two runs where five hour shifts are just given to roads salting and maintenance to keep roads open and safe for the general public to get to and work or school,” he said.
“We work on flooding too – it brings all sorts of weather. You’re working in all conditions and we are well equipped to work in all conditions, but it can be a bit dodgy if you’re working late at night.
"People today are just driving along, talking on their phones, drinking coffee, they don’t even see road signs sometimes. So it can be a bit risky, but we try to reduce that with signage and cones and safety tapers when we’re working on roads,” John explained.
Despite the weather conditions, John said that the job is a good one, and that Tipperary County Council have always been a good employer.
"They’ve always been a good employer, and an employer that would listen if you had a family problem, they’ll meet you and they always say that they’ll sort something out.
"I never found anything negative working for them. Before I came into the council, back then you were looking at people leaving the country on buses and planes and trains and boats to get employment, but it was nice to get into an established routine of employment,” he said.
For John, the job has always been about more than just roads and maintenance – it’s about community. As Cahir continues to grow in popularity with tourists and locals alike, he takes satisfaction in knowing the work he and his crew do every day plays a part in that.