The members of Clare PPN have two main ways that they can influence the decisions made by Clare County Council. The first is by electing people from amongst our members into positions on all the committees and decision making structures in the council. The second is by participating whenever your council calls for input from the public. We will publicise those calls and invitations here.

Influence Policy Vote

  1. Putting our people at the heart of decision making

Clare County Council is comprised of your elected local representatives as well as council staff and the County Manager. The councillors are responsible for making most of the decisions for what is to be done in the county, however they often take direction and expertise from the council staff and from other people with valuable expertise or experience.

In order to gather all these voices together the Council runs four ‘Strategic Planning Committees’ or SPCs for short and it also runs the Joint Policing Committee JPC, and the Local Community Development Committee LCDC. These committees have members from a variety of backgrounds some are councillors, some from community groups, some are council staff, some people are from business agricultural or trade union backgrounds.  These committees usually research, discuss and propose the course of action that they want the council to take on any issue or plan and then once that has been done the elected councillors will officially adopt the policy decision at their official council meeting.

The PPN is responsible for holding elections and selecting the people from amongst its membership who will sit on these committees. These representatives then have the job of attending all the meetings of their particular committee and of bringing the concerns or ideas from the community groups in Clare into those meetings. They also have responsibility to feedback whatever is happening to the people who elected them.

At the moment we have 16 representatives elected from the membership of community and voluntary groups in the county who sit on these committees. To see who your PPN Representatives are and what’s happening on their committees click here.

To see the members of all of Clare County Council’s Committees see below:

Influene Policy

  1. Consultations and Calls for Submissions

Sometimes when the Council wants to gather views, opinions and local expertise they will make a public call for submissions or hold public consultations. When that happens we will add the details and the links and instructions on how to have your voice heard here.

Having Your Voice Heard at National and EU Level:

Although Clare PPN’s main job is to make sure people can participate in decisions made at County level, Clare residents can of course influence national and EU policies too. When we hear of an opportunity for you to have your voice heard at National level we will post it here and for EU level here.

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