Council told to 'investigate a five-year gap in burial records in the Larne area'
Mid and East Antrim Borough Council has been told to “investigate a five-year gap in burial records in the Larne area”.
This was one of the recommendations which had been recorded in an internal audit progress report by accountancy firm Deloitte presented to the Audit and Scrutiny Committee at a meeting in The Braid, Ballymena, on Thursday evening.
Commenting on the recommendation, committee chair Bannside DUP Alderman Tom Gordon said: “Council is investigating a five-year gap in burial records in the Larne area.
“Burial records are essential. People need to be buried in the right place. That would concern me. I am hopeful that all this information can be found and put into the proper place.”
Interim chief executive Valerie Watts told the committee that, “as the auditor reports”, all are in storage.
The report says “We recommend that the council investigates the five-year gap in burial records within the Larne area.
“If the manual ledger records are available, the information recorded on these should be transferred on to ‘Plotbox’. If the manual records are not available, the council needs to consider if alternative data is available to recreate the records.”
Legacy Information
The original management response noted in the report says “legacy information may not be available”, adding: “Every attempt will be made to investigate the whereabouts of this information.”
However, an update last month notes all ledgers have been “located and stored in cemetery office” and the “admin team is working through the process of data input into Plotbox”. ‘Plotbox’ is part of a government IT procurement framework.
The report noted that the recommendation, which was made in 2021/22, is “partially implemented”.
Larne Lough DUP Ald Paul Reid highlighted a concern over the possibility that someone could have bought a grave “in good faith” and then discover in the future it belongs to someone else as it has been “reissued”. He indicated that he has dealt with a case and a party colleague has dealt with another.
He called for the implementation scheduled for December 31 2025 to be “fast-tracked”. “It is not something, I want this council to have to deal with,” he stated.
The interim chief executive went on to say she is considering a request from operations manager Shaun Morley to appoint a cemetery manager for the Mid and East Antrim Borough “in light of complaints we have been receiving about cemeteries recently, not just in the Larne area, but right across the borough”.
“That is something I am giving very serious consideration to as long as we can find a salary,” the interim chief executive said.
The highest number of complaints received by the borough council during the first three months of this year related to cemeteries, in particular, plot damage and subsidence, of which there were 17 complaints.
Between April 1 and June 30, 31 complaints involved park operations, the majority of which involved grave complaints, a recent report stated. It said that “graves needed tidied up due to overgrown grass and shrubs”.
However, it has been agreed that areas around graves will no longer be sprayed with weed killer and grass will be “strimmed around graves going forward”.