Strength of Dublin councils should be sustained as Citizen’s Assembly begins, says councillor

The upcoming Citizen’s Assembly which will discuss whether a directly elected mayor is appropriate for Dublin, should commit to retaining the four local councils, says Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County councillor John Kennedy.

The assembly, which is due to begin Saturday, April 9, will include a review of the following proposal: “a single elected Dublin authority with a mayor and no local councils.”

Kennedy says that the portion of the proposal which raises the matter of eliminating all Dublin councils was not originally included in the discussion.

“It ought to be remembered that the rationale for the assembly is primarily to consider a directly-elected mayor for Dublin which as in other metropolitan areas such as London and Greater Manchester is accompanied by local councils,” he says.

“The fact that the citizens’ assembly has morphed to now consider the abolishing of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, Dublin City Council, Fingal County Council and South Dublin County Council is highly regrettable.”

Kennedy, a Fine Gael councillor, said that the local authorities do a good job in representing their local communities and are a positive mechanism for governance.

“The existing four councils in Dublin work very well in terms of strongly localized representation close to communities whereas only one authority for the whole of Dublin would be a behemoth, substantially more distant from citizens,” he said.

“In order to preserve the fundamental integrity of how the Seanad is elected, in terms of geographic voter distribution by population, the number of councillors in Dublin (each getting a vote as local representatives) would need to remain at the existing number of 183 councillors, necessitating a Dublin authority chamber to represent local views greater in size than the Dáil.”

“A decision by the citizens’ assembly, based upon the premise of random participant selection as opposed to democratic selection, to seek to abolish the existing Dublin councils would be detrimental and if such a viewpoint emerges, must be robustly opposed by the four Dublin councils.”