Dublin city councillors have more residents to represent than councillors in any other part of the country

In June 2024, residents of Dublin city will elect 63 councillors to represent them in local government. That’s one councillor for every 9,400 Dubliners.

The ratio makes Dublin city the most poorly represented council area in Ireland.

On the other end of the scale, people who live in Ireland’s smallest county, Leitrim, are the best represented. They’ll be electing 18 councillors – one for every 2,000 people.

The average across councils is around 5,400 people per councillor nationwide.

Aodh Quinlivan, a senior lecturer in government and politics at University College Cork, says the constitution provides for an equal ratio of population to seats in Dáil Éireann, but there is no similar provision for local chambers.

The number of seats on each local council is decided by the central government and expressed through national legislation, he says.

Some local Dublin city representatives say that the high proportion of constituents affects the services they can offer.

It impacts their workload and that increased workload creates additional challenges and barriers to young people entering politics, they say.

“It’s a serious issue,” says Labour Councillor Darragh Moriarty. “It means that there is a greater distance between the public representatives and the public.”

“There is an issue of representatives’ workload,” says Feljin Jose, who is running for the Green Party in Cabra-Glasnevin.

Being a councillor in Dublin city is a demanding job, Jose says, that is paid a part-time salary of less than €29,000 per year. Councillors also get a bit more if they chair committee meetings, and an expenses allowance.

That impacts who can afford to run for the council and could put young people off, he says. “You’re either stupid like me, and you really believe in something, or you’re independently wealthy.”

Moriarty says he juggles being an active councillor with a full-time job in communications. But it is an uneven playing field because councillors who don’t have other full-time jobs can easily respond to constituents immediately.

How did it come about?

The situation arose due to the traditional county system in Ireland, says Sinn Féin Councillor Micheál MacDonncha.

“If you have a bigger catchment area that means you have more work,” he says. “It points to the need to reform and reconfigure local government.”

It is also part of the very centralised form of local government in Ireland, he says. “It needs to be put in the context of the need for better democratic local government.”

“There is no population threshold between local authorities, and the number of seats on local councils is not strictly proportionate to population,” says Quinlivan, the senior lecturer at University College Cork.

Councils can petition central government to change the number of seats, he says, and that would be decided by the minister with responsibility for local government.

“While such requests are infrequent, central government can on its own initiative review the number of council seats within different areas,” he says.

In 2014, central government reformed local government. It abolished town and borough councils and merged several county and city councils, says Quinlivan. That reduced the number of councillors overall.

More populated council areas gained some seats and Dublin City Council went from 52 to 63 at that time, he says.

Evening it out

As well as attending the council meetings to steer council policy and activities, councillors may advocate for constituents to help them access services, or push to resolve issues with their council housing or subsidies.

They might help people with paperwork or refer them to the appropriate agency. They may also sit on other boards as part of their role, and active councillors attend residents’ meetings and other local meetings too.

Moriarty, the Labour councillor, says one solution would be to create even more seats for councillors on Dublin City Council, but that could become unwieldy to manage if the council got too big.

“Maybe they should look at a model where if the population goes over a certain threshold the councillor becomes a full-time job,” says Moriarty.

Jose, the Green Party candidate, says a councillor’s workload is more demanding in an urban area as well, especially in the city centre, which gets huge footfall.

“It’s particularly unfortunate that it’s Dublin city where things are worse,” he says.

Residents of Dublin are negatively impacted because it affects the kind of services they can get from public representatives, he says. It could also influence who goes into politics.

Young people from low-income backgrounds wouldn’t be able to cover housing costs on a councillor’s salary, says Jose. “It is a barrier for young people.”

Moriarty says he juggles a full-time job in communications with being a councillor, which he can only do thanks to flexibility from his employer. Not all jobs would allow employees to attend meetings during the work day, he says.

It feels stressful if you don’t have time to get back to all the constituents who contacted you, he says.

They might get the impression that you aren’t working hard if you don’t get back quickly, he says. “It’s the opposite,” he says. “You’re killing yourself by trying to do everything.”