'Ludicrous' system leaves Dublin councillors with no say over €3.8bn budget
Dublin City Council is being hamstrung by a system that gives elected officials control over less than 1% of the city's multi-billion euro capital budget according to one councillor.
Labour Cllr Dermot Lacey has consistently spoken out about the ways he feels local authorities are being undermined by a system that doesn’t appropriately represent the people. During the noting of the Capital Programme 2026 - 2028 earlier this month, he railed against the fact that councillors were expected to accept the adoption of a near €4 billion expenditure plan without elected members contributing to the plan.
“We have to recognise that the capital budget contains primarily the preferences and choices made by the executive and not by the elected council. That’s not a criticism of the officials, they have a job to do. But it’s recognition of the process we are in,” Cllr Lacey said at the April monthly council meeting.
“We get to decide the €12 million or so we keep from the local property tax and the executive gets to determine the €3.8b to spend on the capital programme. It’s worth noting we don’t have to adopt this budget, we just note it and the manager can do what he likes.”
Cllr Lacey described this circumstance as a “profound disagreement” within the system, with representatives required to note the plan while only being given just a few short minutes to voice their opinion of it. “That’s no way to adopt a budget in this day and age,” he said.
He called for more discussion at area committees and relevant strategic policy committees before such a major plan is put forward to the general council. Cllr Lacey also called out “the little things buried” within the Capital Programme that councillors will later be told they had agreed.
“In there is the very contentious Strand Road cycleway . When that comes back and is an issue and there’s murder in the area we will be told we voted for it. I am not arguing for or against it, but it’s a contentious thing buried in there and there’s a lot more,” he said.
Chief Executive Richard Shakespeare said he agrees with Cllr Lacey’s assertion and he is happy to work out a process to address his concerns. “A lot of these projects and capital works programmes come out of area committee discussions and staff put them in, but it could be better, I don’t disagree with you,” he said.
“I am not the type of Chief Executive that wants it all my own way. An awful lot of these projects have been here since long before I was here. It is worth a discussion.”
Mr Shakespeare defended the inclusion of projects like the Strand Road cycleway as essential for the provision of funding. “I get the difficulty it causes, it’s not intentional, we don’t slip it in there,” he said.
Speaking with Dublin Live, Cllr Lacey said that Ireland has a lot of catching up to do compared to other European countries when it comes to the autonomy of local government. He cited the Council of Europe's Congress of Local and Regional Authorities monitoring report from 2023, which identified Ireland as having one of the weakest and most centralised local government systems in Europe.
“They put us fourth last place. The only countries that had a worse system to us were Moldova, Hungary, and Russia and that’s an independent international assessment of us. That doesn’t reflect on us well,” he said.
The lack of power that local representatives have in regards to funding allocations is frustrating according to Cllr Lacey, who said they are the first to be blamed when projects fall apart or become too costly. “But we don’t really have a say in determining those things in the first place,” he said.
Cllr Lacey outlined his view that the entire local authority system is outdated and believes “we cannot run Dublin city on the basis of one area meeting and one full council meeting” per month. “It’s ludicrous to think we can still run things the way gentleman farmers ran county councils 100 years ago - important things are dealt with in seconds,” he said.
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