Mayo councillors emails being 'quarantined'

EMAILS to Mayo councillors are ending up in 'quarantine', which is causing frustration.

Those not getting through to their inboxes include emails from Oireachtas members, while correspondence from Mayo Sports Partnership and Mayo PPN is also getting diverted.

With a spend of €4.2 million on IT services, Councillor Donna Sheridan said the situation has 'gone beyond frustrating' and she has lost confidence.

There is a multi-step process to get them taken out of quarantine.

They were spending this amount of money and yet they couldn't get their emails, and she would be looking for a cut in that budget and for the money to be put into services instead.

Councillor Sheridan said she was told the biggest risk was to the council's IT services.

However, she felt it was their firefighters serving the public or the people going out gritting roads who were the priorities.

Supporting his colleague, Councillor Michael Kilcoyne said many people running for the Seanad had sent emails and they were all put into quarantine.

There were sections within the council itself who send emails that meet a similar fate, with the sports partnership and PPN regularly getting classed as 'spam'.

What kind of service was that, he said, requesting a report for their next meeting.

Mindful of the cyber threat, Councillor Damian Ryan requested the matter be on the agenda for their next meeting, to explain how they can deal with accessing emails.

Members were told by director of services Peter Duggan that the council has adopted a process to mitigate against cyber attack.

Members were issued with an email address with firewalls and security attached, and he made no excuses for asking that that is how they do business as it minimises risk.

The amount of spam is increasing and there can be cyber attack.

There is a process where you can request emails be released and white listed so it should not go into spam again.

There has to be a balance, said Councillor Sheridan, and she didn't feel it was in members' favour at the moment.

They cannot get their simple emails and they cannot access what they need to do their role, she said.