Derry City and Strabane District Council have been urged to reopen the public gallery to allow people to make representations before committee members.
Campaigning group Derry Against Fuel Poverty made the call after a special meeting of the council was held on December 6 in relation to the lack of delivery of the £600 Energy Support payment.
The public gallery at the council's chamber at the Guildhall has been closed since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.
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A spokesperson for the group, Sinead Quinn, said: “There are many discussions and debates going on right now about the lack of support for households in Northern Ireland.
"We saw a failed Assembly recall this week on this exact topic. Our own local Council [held] another such debate [on Friday].
"With the public gallery closed, many local people won’t be able to be present in this meeting.
“One of our activists, and an activist in his own right, Paul Hughes, has been in constant contact with Council on this exact issue. The line from Council is that the public gallery is still closed due to the threat of coronavirus>Covid.
"We are being constantly directed to the YouTube live stream. We held a protest last week outside the Guildhall where another meeting was being held to highlight this very issue.
“We sat outside in the cold for hours broadcasting the audio from the YouTube channel across the Guildhall Square so everyone could hear what was being said about us without us being in the room.
“When it comes to Youtube, not everyone is tech-savvy. Not everyone can afford broadband. Local libraries aren’t open every evening late into the evening. But this issue goes to the heart of accountability not just transparency."
She added: It is much more difficult for Council officers and Councillors to make proposals and decisions about peoples’ lives whenever they see their very faces sitting across from them in the room.
"We are the people that elected them. The decisions they make involve the use of ratepayers and taxpayer money.
"We believe councillors and council officials alike need reminding on a constant basis that they serve the public, not the council itself, and we are very willing to do that. We have every right to be active participants in governance not observers or bystanders.”
However, speaking on the topic at last month's Governance and Strategic Planning Meeting last month, DCSDC Chief Executive, John Kelpie, said: “Members will recall that the current operation of the committees is a hybrid method which is to be reviewed in January, and as part of that agreement members agreed that members of the public would not be agreed to the chamber during this period."
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