As the sun sets on Ray McAdam’s stint as Lord Mayor of Dublin, we ask: How has he done?
It is a common thing once a Lord Mayor is elected to make a flurry of starry-eyed promises, despite the role being a largely ceremonial one.
Having said that, Dublin’s first citizen does wield a substantial degree of soft power in the city by virtue of the platform and the number of ceremonies and events they participate in.
Ray McAdam, Lord Mayor for the last 10 months, is one such person who has seemingly relished the meet-and-greets, opening ceremonies and public-facing aspects that accompany the position.
But the Fine Gael councillor was not shy about making plenty of political pledges at the time of his election to the Mansion House last June.
As the sun sets on his mayoralty and the focus turns to his Dublin Central by-election run, we examine how several of his key commitments are progressing and where goals have slipped as ambition clashes with reality.
This was an important part of Mr McAdam’s pitch to tackle dereliction and vacancy, and would be a big step forward in improving the transparency of the city’s vacancy and dereliction-tackling mechanisms.
“If we can see the problem, we can solve it,” he said in his inaugural address, promising that the map would be “updated regularly, mapped street by street and visible to all”.
Unfortunately, while the council has taken steps to overhaul its dereliction strategy with Mr McAdam at the helm, there has been no sign of a publicly accessible vacancy map.
Speaking to the Irish Independent, he said the work of mapping streets had now begun, starting with a pilot on North Frederick Street and Middle Abbey Street in the north inner city.
The goal is then to expand to more streets, gradually forming a city-wide map of vacancy and dereliction through the council’s forthcoming Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) on regeneration.
Led by former Department of Health secretary general Robert Watt, the SPV will be set up to deliver on the “10 Big Moves” set out in 2024’s McRedmond Report. These include dereliction, regeneration and the improvement of city services.
This was a commitment to convene a group of people from several disciplines – planning, transport, culture, commerce, community and others – to plan for how the capital should look in 2050.
To date, no such commission has been named or convened, but Mr McAdam said the work of planning for the city would now also take place under the SPV structure.
“Working with colleagues politically and across the executive, the ambitions that I set out, a lot of them have now been incorporated into the urban regeneration framework,” he said.
“That framework with the special purpose vehicle – that will deliver the long-term vision for the city centre, and I think we will now have the vehicle to bring forward a credible pathway to deliver that over the next 25 years.”
During his inaugural speech, Mr McAdam said Dublin should be a city “where disabilities are seen, heard and empowered”.
In September, he hosted an event in the Mansion House with the Dublin Chamber of Commerce on the topic of supporting people with disabilities into work.
“That conversation then developed further into working with Bank of Ireland, where I helped launch their neuro-divergent employer toolkit,” he said. This is a guide helping firms to recruit, retain and support neuro-divergent staff in their organisations.
Autism has also been a major focus for the council over the last year. In February, elected members adopted a wide-ranging three-year strategy, in partnership with charity AsIAm, to make Dublin an autism-friendly city.
This involves making infrastructure in the city more inclusive and accessible, promoting understanding of autism to reduce stigma and encouraging pathways to employment for people with autism.
This was to be a platform set up “for young people to shape the city around them”, Mr McAdam said in his speech last June.
“This will be a citywide civic dialogue leading to a formal report to council and a public conversation between young Dubliners and city decision-makers.”
To date, no online or other platform has been set up with this title, and no report has been produced for consideration by the council.
Mr McAdam told the Irish Independent the platform was more of an “informal” one, as he invited schools to the Mansion House and interacted with children, rather than a formal feedback space.
He said he would be recommending that his successors continue to engage with children and hear their ideas, adding that their enthusiasm had been “utterly infectious”.