Revealed: Dublin gets less than €150,000 a year from Government for road maintenance while other counties get up to €78m
Dublin’s four local authorities have been allocated a fraction of 1pc of the Government’s lucrative road maintenance packages in recent years.
The most recent annual funding round for local and regional roads, announced in February, promised an injection of €718m spread across all 31 local authorities.
Dublin City Council (DCC) got €41,000, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council (DLR) took in €38,000, while Fingal County Council (FCC) and South Dublin County Council (SDCC) received €33,000 each.
By comparison, Co Cork is in receipt of €90.2m (€78.1m for Cork County Council and €12.1m for Cork City Council) from the same package.
Other councils were also allocated significant sums, such as Tipperary County Council (€49.4m), Mayo County Council (€41.2m) and Donegal County Council (€46.2m).
Funding records indicate that over the last few years, Co Dublin has cumulatively lost out on hundreds of millions for road maintenance compared with other councils around the country.
For example, between 2020 and this year, Co Cork’s two councils have been allocated just over €572m through various government packages, on top of their existing road budgets.
Over the same period, Dublin’s four councils have received just over €2m through those same funding streams.
While Cork does have a road network roughly four times larger than Dublin, this doesn’t fully explain the disparity in funding for the two counties.
According to a Department of Transport spokesperson, the four Dublin councils are considered self-funded when it comes to road maintenance because of how Local Property Tax (LPT) is structured.
“Accordingly, these councils do not feature in most of the grant programmes,” they said.
It is important to note that this does not mean that Dublin’s roads receive far less maintenance money than other counties.
Dublin councils have allocated €134m to the maintenance of local and regional roads this year, while Cork councils will spend just over €142m.
When taking Cork’s much larger road network into account, this means they are spending €18,886 per kilometre on these roads, versus €38,159 for the equivalent in Dublin.
However, the figures show that councils outside the capital receive significantly more support from the Government than those in it.
Almost all funding that Dublin councils spend on roads comes from their own resources.
In the case of Cork, almost 40pc of road maintenance funding comes directly from the Government. In some counties, such as Leitrim, the support swells to more than half (51.1pc).
Without the same grants as other counties, Dublin must use far more of its own resources to finance road maintenance, potentially taking from other areas in its budget, such as housing, emergency services, parks and active travel.
To understand the “self-funded” label by the Government to Dublin, it is necessary to delve into the complicated structure of LPT, a tax introduced in 2013 on homeowners based on the value of their property.
A key component of the calculation is what is known as the baseline figure. This is what Government says is the necessary level of funding to make sure a council can deliver “adequate” levels of service to citizens.
A spokesperson for the Department of Housing and Local Government said the baseline was loosely based on the general-purpose grants the Government previously distributed to councils before the introduction of LPT local retention in 2015.
The methodology to calculate baselines was revised in 2023 to consider more factors, such as the local authority’s area, income, deprivation level, population and alignment with national policy priorities.
But in practice, the proportion of funds did not change significantly following the review.
This is because the Government decided no council should receive less than its previous baseline figure, and each authority would receive a boost of at least €1.5m, regardless of the outcome of the review.
‘One council got €78m, another got €50m, Dublin [City Council] got €41,000’
Due to the new rubric’s heavy weighting in favour of area and ability to raise income (collectively deciding 62.5pc of the allocation), the updated calculations remain heavily skewed in favour of rural councils.
For example, this year Tipperary County Council and DCC are assigned almost the same baseline figure for service delivery – €28.2m and €28.4m, respectively, even though DCC serves roughly three times as many residents.
Many rural authorities, such as Donegal (€27.4m), Mayo (€22m) and Galway County Council (€21.6m) have been assigned baseline figures close to that of DCC, despite serving fewer people.
Due to its large, high-value property base, DCC is set to bring in well over its baseline – around €109m in LPT receipts this year. This is the highest LPT take of any local authority by far.
The other Dublin councils will take in between €40m and €69m, also significantly more than their baseline figures.
In fact, 10 local authorities are set to run a surplus over and above their baseline this year.
These are the four Dublin councils, Cork County Council, Cork City Council, Galway City Council, Kildare County Council, Meath County Council and Wicklow County Council.
If a council brings in significantly more than its baseline, the Government mandates that a portion of it is spent on the “self-funding” of housing and/or roads, thereby replacing central government funding.
The Department of Transport and Department of Housing decided that five of these 10 councils (DCC, DLR, SDCC, FCC and Cork County Council) would have their surpluses split between roads and housing funding.
The other five councils are to spend their self-funding portions on housing alone.
A spokesperson for the Department of Housing said LPT self-funding had its roots in 2015, when an analysis was carried out of the council’s housing programmes “to determine which programmes could absorb a reasonable level of self-funding”.
“However, given that the level of expenditure for those programmes was less than the total amount available for self-funding at the time, it was decided to expand self-funding to include certain roads programmes,” they said.
“For efficiency purposes, the Department of Transport decided to limit the use of LPT receipts for the self-funding of roads to a small number of local authorities (the four Dublin authorities and Cork County only).”
A similar methodology had been in place ever since, they said.
Labour’s Dermot Lacey believes Dublin is not being prioritised by the Government
In practice, this means €16.5m of funds annually are diverted to roads from the LPT take of Dublin’s local authorities. This is broken down as €5.8m to DCC, €3.5m for DLR, €3.9m for Fingal and €2.9m to SDCC.
This qualifies them, in the Government’s view, as being self-funded for roads, meaning they are denied such access to substantial annual pots of central road grants.
Labour councillor Dermot Lacey said the capital’s relatively meagre roads allocation was just the latest example of Dublin not being prioritised by the Government.
“Is Dublin not entitled to its reasonable share of the national kitty as every other county is? If the Government’s view is borne out, we must be hundreds of millions in LPT, because every time we raise an issue of funding, the government says it’s funded through the LPT,” he told the Irish Independent.
“One council got €78m, another got €50m, Dublin [City Council] got €41,000,” he said.
On top of that, the money allocated for DCC is only going towards staff training and pavement surveys, rather than road resurfacing.
“Not a single solitary cent for something that’ll actually go on the road,” Mr Lacey said.
The Department of Transport spokesperson said: “The basis for the allocation of funding under this grant programme is the quantum of regional and local roads within each local authority area of responsibility, which is held as being the most equitable.”
The Department of Housing spokesperson said the LPT allocation model, as currently laid out, was “in accordance with government policy”.