Dublin’s Citizens’ Assembly has strongly recommended a powerful, directly elected mayor for the capital city - and it can’t come soon enough.
More cities internationally are embracing the idea of a directly elected mayor. Dublin needs to keep up and allow strong political leadership that can implement a coherent vision for the city.
Local government in Ireland is broken – and has been for decades. Councils can barely pave a road without asking permission from central government. They don’t have independent funding, and no unified political leadership.
Read more: Dublin Citizens' Assembly votes in favour of powerful directly elected mayor
This problem is so clear in Dublin. We are a big, prosperous, international city. Yet the expectations for how Dublin looks and functions fall far below comparable European capitals.
Most Dubliners rightly love the city, but you cannot be blind to its extreme housing shortage, disconnected transport network, and streets in desperate need of TLC.
When I was elected to Dublin City Council in 2019, one of the first things I was told was to “lower expectations”. Two years into the term, a brilliant local colleague resigned from the council, saying she was no longer willing to spend her days explaining how she wasn’t able to help people.
In recent months, a member of city management confessed that “local government is basically s**t these days.”
Low morale like this is not a failing of individual managers, councillors or staff. It is systemic.
Dublin City Council is the country’s largest local authority by far, but small compared to other countries. Dublin city employs under 6,000 people. Helsinki has 38,000.
If the council wants to hire a single extra staff member, it has to apply for permission to national government. If approved, that staff member’s funding will likely be set nationally and paired with inflexible conditions. Much of their work will be governed by national, one size fits all policy - not policy set locally or on a city-wide basis.
A similar frustration is felt by elected councillors. They arrive with a clear political mandate from elections, but have little to no powers to actually do something with it. We often work as glorified internal lobbyists, or the public face of actions we had little control over.
An empowered directly elected mayor could break this maddening system wide open. A strong mayor could fuse the executive powers with a direct political mandate.
In its recommendations agreed over the weekend, the Citizens’ Assembly called for mayoral powers across a wide range of areas, including housing, transport, waste, nightlife, arts, planning and land use. For education and health, the assembly members have asked that mayoral powers be granted in a few years, allowing the new structure to bed down.
The Assembly recommended that the Mayor be allowed borrow funds internationally and raise or lower city taxes to secure independent funding for the city. They also wisely recommended a small citywide assembly to scrutinise the Mayor’s work.
These recommendations came after many hours of discussion and presentations to the assembly members: 80 people from across the county, including 12 of Dublin’s councillors. I was lucky to be one of them, hearing about how mayors work from academics, politicians, experts, and mayoral figures from the UK, the US, and France. The presentations also drew on the early lessons from Limerick, which voted to have a directly elected mayor in 2019.
The members of the assembly did not have to reinvent the wheel. We can borrow the best bits from mayoral systems around the world - of which there are hundreds.
Some mayors - like Rudi Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, or Boris Johnson - are well-known household names. Others, like Paris’ Anne Hidalgo or Manchester’s Andy Burnham, have developed reputations for driving forward a transformative agenda for their city.
I worked as a press officer for the current Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, in 2018. I saw first-hand how his strong powers in housing and planning allowed him to squeeze more affordable housing from developers, or push through long-delayed cycling projects for the whole city.
London maintained its local councils, but had a clear political direction set by the citywide Mayor. Whether it was public transport, policing, or arts: the Mayor of London was pushing a clear vision and was immediately relevant and present in Londoners’ lives.
When the city needed leadership to respond to a given crisis, he was the one who provided it. When London needed to speak, he was its voice.
Who can realistically do that for Dublin? The difference between London and Dublin is like night and day.
The Citizens’ Assembly will now produce a final report with our recommendations. We have asked the government to respond within six months and to implement the findings within two years.
A proper mayoralty for Dublin has had many false dawns, most notably with then-Minister John Gormley’s excellent 2010 bill, which never made it through the Oireachtas. There is a cynical view that central government will never willingly give power to local government.
This is well-founded, but we know that in many other countries, central government has done exactly that. Hopefully the government will take the impetus from this Citizens’ Assembly and finally deliver new structures for the capital.
Dublin’s current local government simply doesn’t work. We should learn from other cities where it does.
To me and the 80 members of the Citizens’ Assembly, that means a proper Mayor for Dublin. Our city is crying out for leadership.
Michael Pidgeon is a Green Party Councillor for the South West Inner City and the Green leader on Dublin City Council.
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