Mark Alderdice wondered about the cost — “Would have looked better not being all over the building, maybe just in the roof, wonder how much this cost?”
Joy Doogan remains puzzled by it — “What is it?”
I was myself more than puzzled by it. I was shocked to see the very expensive tiles on the exterior of the building. They would be more appropriate INSIDE a public toilet, but thyat’s what happens when when people have too much money to spend and particularly when it’s not their own money.
* The Dumbarton Democrat would have asked who designed this and who sanctioned it and how much it cost, and whose crazy idea it was to site it between a public house and a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts, but the Council won’t talk to us.
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Just as well when I became a journalist that my decision to do so wasn’t with a view to making friends and influencing people.
As you will have gathered from reading this Notebook column, I am not the most popular guy with the establishment in Dumbarton, particularly not with West Dunbartonshire Council.
To be perfectly truthful, they can’t stand me and detest my modus operandum of looking for the truth behind the spin, lies and corruption put out by high salaried spin doctors paid from the public purse.
I started out in local journalism and have worked nationally and internationally on some of the most respected newspapers and broadcasting organisations in the world.
I’ve been on foot and helicopter patrols with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Europe and Northern Ireland where I came under gunfire from terrorists, but I have never been treated so badly or disrespected so much as I have been by West Dunbartonshire Council.
I have won the Scottish Weekly Journalist of the Year three times and many other awards for journalistic excellence and exceptional reporting by the Law Society of Scotland and other prestigious organisations without meeting the kind of obstruction I have experienced here.
I helped train a number of young men and women when I was a newspaper editor and a special adviser to the First MInister of Scotland in Edinburgh, and I worked in politics in London, Dublin and Brussels.
But I was told by West Dunbartonshire Council that I wasn’t a fit person to cover their meetings in Church Street because I had allegedly interupted a meeting.
That was a lie. What I had done was ask Provost William Hendrie to ask his staff to alter the sound system so that the press and public, who were forced to sit in a gallery from which they couldn’t see or hear who was present, or identify who was speaking at the meeting.
Since then WDC do not allow me to speak to their highly paid press officers, one of whom is said to earn £129,000 a year in strange circumstances, and told me to wait in the often endless queue the public face day and daily to ask a question in a naive Comlplaints Column, which does no more than highlight how bad things are here.
Or to submit a Freedom of Information request, which can take weeks if not months to answer.
All this came to mind when I read this week that the BBC News and three leading news agencies have expressed desperate concern for journalists in Gaza, who they say are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.
Those journalists reporting the conflict from Gaza now face starvation and “the same dire circumstances as those they are covering,” a joint statement from BBC News, Agence France-Presse (AFP), Associated Press (AP) and Reuters said.
“For many months, these independent journalists have been the world’s eyes and ears on the ground in Gaza”, it reads. “International news outlets rely on local reporters within Gaza, as Israel does not allow foreign media, including BBC News, to send journalists into the territory.”
Now, I cannot claim to have been starved by West Dunbartonshire Council, but I have been refused a glass water by the former Chief Executive Joyce White, pictured left, now happily departed the scene on a huge golden goodbye, while sitting through a meeting lasting for hours.
She instructed staff that I was not allowed water to drink from the same source as councillors and that I was banned from going up the same stairway to enter the council chamber as they use. What a load of palaver!
Naturally, in the wake of that, I have received considerable satisfaction from the fact that the Council is soon going to be fully exposed in that they will have to pay out around £1 million in compensation for the proven fact that they bullied and victimised a disabled member of their staff to the extent that he suffered a mental breakdown.
That money will not come out of their pockets, of course. The public will be mugged for it yet again.
I celebrated my 80th birthday this week and have written thousands of stories over a long number of years, but writing this story will give me a great deal of satisfaction exposing the arrogance and hubris of our council officials in Dumbarton.
What is they say about this sort of thing?
Don’t get mad, get even.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said this week that he would jail the people responsible for the shambles that is the Queen Elizabeth II University Hospital, which looks after the most seriously ill adults and children from West Dunbartonshire, writes BILL HEANEY
And now we have this one which has made the council a laughing stock yet again in the eyes of the public who have been asking for months w
I spoke to [Labour council leader]Martin Rooney about the point of West Dunbartonshire’s new library, since we had a disabled friendly one already, and why couldn’t part of this money be used to save Balloch Library, which now resides in a glorified cupboard as part of Balloch Campus?