A CONTROVERSIAL councillor has been accused of 'cheap political point scoring' out of the Lebanese explosion tragedy.

Alex Gallagher was responding to a tweet by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon of a grandmother playing 'Auld Lang Syne' on a piano in her ravaged Beirut home.

Ms Sturgeon described the moving video as 'a song of connection and solidarity as our hearts go out to Beirut' and urged people to support the Red Cross in Lebanon, if they could.

However, the North Ayrshire Labour councillor replied: "But we've cut music departments to the bone."

His political rivals today called for Mr Gallagher, who has caused outrage on the social media previously with various remarks, to remove himself from the platform.

Cllr Alan Hill said: "To think that an elected councillor would stoop so low as to try and make cheap political capital out of tragedy, I am a little lost for words.

"As a former member of the Labour Party, I do find it rather sad to see how far it has fallen in recent years.

"Councillor Gallagher is an embarrassment to his constituents, his council group and himself.

"Grow up and for the love of God get off social media."

Cunninghame North MSP Kenneth Gibson said the under-fire politician should concentrate on what he was elected to do.

He added: “Cllr Gallagher’s often tasteless and outlandish views, which show him to be a person lacking in empathy, are unlikely to win him many plaudits from his constituents.

“Over the years, his daft tweets have ranged from saying that people in Somerset who had their homes flooded ‘deserved it’ for not voting Labour, to bizarrely suggesting that former First Minister Alex Salmond had ‘done a deal with the Catholic Church to hand an independent Scotland over to the Vatican.’

“If Cllr Gallagher wants to do himself and everyone else a favour, he should remove himself from Twitter.”

Late last year, Mr Gallagher sparked a storm when he re-tweeted a video of MSP Mhairi Black voicing her allegiance to the Queen at the re-opening of Westminster following the general election and labelled her a 'ned'.

And in May, Cllr Gallagher waded into a row involving the First Minister and the BBC, telling a network reporter to 'grow a backbone and tell Nicola Sturgeon to f____ off."

It came after Mrs Sturgeon hit back at claims she was ‘enjoying setting her own rules’ outside of England amid the coronavirus pandemic on a BBC news bulletin.

Following a complaint to the Ethics Commission, Cllr Gallagher was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Cllr Gallagher, who heads the economy portfolio in North Ayrshire cabinet, and is lead post-Covid-19 service change and transformation, branded complaints from the local SNP group in relation to his previous tweets as 'hysterics'.

In June, he said: "As for the complaints from the local SNP group, I always felt that they were exaggerated. After all the hysterics of recent weeks, it's good to see that the commissioner has decided not to take the complaints forward."

The News has asked council leader Joe Cullinane to comment on last week's tweet.