Council briefs: Rethinking community wardens, lighting up parks in evenings, and upgrading bus shelters

Rethinking community wardens

When Fianna Fáil Councillor Eoghan O’Brien was in St Catherine’s Park just after Christmas, he saw a person with a restricted breed of dog.

The council manager in charge of this kind of thing, David Storey, was quick to assign a dog warden to respond, O’Brien said.

But the dog warden had to head over from across the county in Balbriggan, said O’Brien at the Fingal County Council meeting on 13 January. “Obviously the owner of said dogs was long gone by that stage.”

In a motion, O’Brien called on the council’s chief executive, AnnMarie Farrelly, to support moving towards a set-up of less specialised wardens, who could enforce more than one set of bylaws.

That would make the enforcement of bylaws – from littering to parking – much more efficient, he said.

How enforcement of council bylaws is done doesn’t make sense anymore, he said.

“You could have an authorised officer of this council who is looking after one particular matter in a particular area who might walk past a breach of the litter bylaw, or a breach of the waste presentation bylaw,” he said.

Park rangers are around in parks but aren’t empowered to act under bylaws, he said. “There’s an opportunity to do things differently.”

Officials were cool on the idea. But councillors agreed the motion.

In his pitch at the meeting for doing things differently, O’Brien cited how many staff there are focused on particular bylaws.

There are four litter wardens countywide, he said, with one each for Dublin 15, Howth-Malahide, Swords-Donabate, and Balbriggan-Rush-Lusk-Skerries.

There are two staff members with a county-wide remit to deal with parking issues beyond the pay-and-display areas, he said.

Meanwhile, the council has more than 500 outdoor staff, said O’Brien.

“Now, I’m not for one second suggesting that all of our outdoor staff should be able to enforce the bylaws,” he said. “But there certainly should, in my view, be room to change up our system to be more effective.”

It was a strong idea, said most councillors who spoke. Restricting people to narrow areas of enforcement doesn’t make sense, said Green Party Councillor David Healy.

“A lot of the skills of enforcement, in terms of dealing with people, in terms of evidence gathering and so on, are transferable between areas,” he said.

At the meeting, Mary Daly, the council’s director of operations, listed some of the bylaws in place: beach bylaws, casual-trading bylaws, harbour bylaws, burial-ground bylaws.

The council appoints authorised officers under the bylaws who deal with issues, Daly said.

Labour Party Councillor Brendan Ryan asked if the same person could be an “authorised officer” – in other words, granted the powers to enforce bylaws – in multiple areas.

“You can be, yes,” said Daly, after a bit of preamble. “But you have to be appointed by chief executive order.”

Storey, the council’s director of environment, said they now had sanction for six litter wardens and were looking to grow that to eight.

There are also now four dog wardens and more money is coming from the central government to hire two more dog wardens for 2025, he said “So those resources will be put in place during the year.”

Lighting up parks

“I was just going through a few of our own documents there earlier on,” said Sinn Féin Councillor Angela Donnelly at the meeting.

She listed all of the ways of getting around that are considered “active travel” in council strategies.

Like, jogging for fun or pushing prams, she said. “I think a lot of the time when we think about active travel we just see cyclists, and we see cyclists commuting.”

She put forward a motion aiming to give other activities besides cycle commuting more of a chance – in particular, over the darker winter months.

She called for a pilot in one of the council’s regional parks to put in lighting, extended park ranger hours and CCTV.

At the moment, regional parks in Fingal are open from 9am to 5pm in November, December and January.

“We’ve fantastic facilities in Fingal. A lot of those cannot be used after dark,” she said. “People – and women and girls in particular, but also people with disabilities and our older population – they don’t feel safe to go out after dark.”

It means no dog walking, no running, no walking in these places after dark, she said.

Dean Mulligan, the Independents 4 Change councillor, said he agrees it is worth having this conversation.

All councillors can probably think of regional parks next to estates, where going through the park is the best way to get there. “But it’s only viable during daytime hours,” he said.

He and other councillors said they thought a pilot was a good idea – while keeping in mind that just because it may work in one place, it won’t necessarily work elsewhere.

Said Labour’s Brian McDonagh:  “What’s good for one park is not going to be good for another park.”

They also need to be careful about biodiversity, McDonagh said. “I would have concerns about the provision of additional lighting in areas of the park that are significant for things like bats.”

They would need to decide, case by case, on what is suitable, he said.

The written response Donnelly got from council managers to her motion said that the budget for 2025 had already been allocated.

Mary Daly, the council’s director of operations, also said at the meeting that she has no budget for a pilot. “You’re talking about putting in public lighting, about putting electricity in, resources, park rangers.”

Donnelly, the Sinn Féin councillor, said: “But we could look at 2026.”

At the meeting, Daly also raised the question of whether putting in lights could increase anti-social behaviour. Anti-social behaviour is a real issue, Daly said.

Donnelly said she is yet to meet a garda who says that putting lighting in an area encourages anti-social behaviour.

For now, the council has a budget for more lighting so all-weather pitches can be used late into the night and they do intend to do that, said Daly, the operations manager.

If the council can put in lighting to guide people to and from all-weather pitches and those pitches are then used after dark, surely the lesson is to light up dog runs, tennis courts, and other facilities too, Donnelly said.

“We do need a conversation about this,” she said. “We can’t just down tools as soon as it gets dark.”

The motion passed.

Upgrading bus shelters

Labour Councillor James Humphreys asked in a motion at Monday’s meeting for a detailed report on the viability of the council installing bus shelters – rather than waiting on the National Transport Authority (NTA).

Councillors at area committee meetings regularly voice frustration at the lack of bus shelters, and at shoddy bus stops, particularly in rural areas.

Putting in bus stops and shelters lies outside the council’s remit, wrote Mary Daly, the council’s director of operations, in response to Humphreys’s motion.

The NTA is responsible for the installation, management and maintenance of bus stops and shelters, she said.

Humphreys’s motion had been prompted by ongoing discussions among councillors about the slow movement from the NTA on requests for bus shelters and stops, he said by phone on Tuesday.

Councillors have also criticised the model under which the NTA gets new bus shelters built – by contracting the job out to the advertising company JCDecaux, which then manages and maintains the shelters.

Humphreys said he has also been thinking about how the council is set to spend millions on the Sustainable Swords project, a regeneration intended to make a new and inviting town centre.

“Slap bang in the heart of that between the council, the cultural quarter and the castle is five, which I would describe as, aesthetically ugly, bus stops,” he said.

So, he wanted a report on council bus shelters to go to the public realm and transport committee, for councillors to consider when they’re looking at the 2026 budget, he said.

At the meeting, once Humphreys had grumbled about bus shelters in the county, other councillors pulled out their own case studies.

Dean Mulligan, the Independents 4 Change councillor, said they need to be conscious that there are places without stops in rural areas, even before any talk of shelters.

The NTA had promised a shelter at the terminus of the 6 bus route in Howth, said

Green Party Councillor David Healy, who backed the motion.

“We haven’t had any engagement with this council in the last three years in terms of allocating resources to do a fully funded project,” he said

Healy said the council is responsible for the public realm. And “I’m not aware of any legal impediment to us providing our own bus shelters, if we want to do”.

But also, the motion is just looking for a report on the viability of the council doing the work, he says. Bus shelters are so far down on the NTA’s priorities nationally, he says.

Nationwide, the NTA put in 127 new bus shelters in 2022, 139 in 2023, and 59 in the first quarter of last year, according to a briefing last April.

Sinn Féin Councillor Malachy Quinn pointed to the needs of people travelling on the 101 bus from Drogheda to Swords, who work in industrial units along the route.

People who are getting up at 6am and are forced to wait for buses in inclement weather, he says.

Joan Hopkins, a Social Democrats councillor, said she had asked for bus shelters in Baldoyle about three years ago. Planning permission went in a year ago but she hasn’t heard anything more, she says.

If the council can go it alone, it should, these councillors said.

At the council’s December monthly meeting, Humphreys had said the council should look at how to fund this.

One idea was for the council to charge commercial rates for the bus stops with advertising, and then ringfence that money for more bus stops, he said.

Kieran Dennison, a Fine Gael councillor, said he was sure the NTA would love councillors to pass Humphreys’s motion.

Then the NTA could take money it had earmarked for bus stops in Fingal and spend it somewhere else, Dennison said. “Or perhaps not spend it at all.”

More useful might be to see what allocation the NTA has for Fingal, he said, and how it decides where to put bus shelters.

Several councillors raised concerns that it was the contractor, JCDecaux, that evaluated whether a bus stop was needed somewhere, but did so through the lens of whether it would want to put advertising there.

Last year, the NTA’s chief executive, Hugh Creegan, told the Oireachtas’s Public Accounts Committee that JCDecaux does install the bus stops. But it only has advertising rights on bus stops where the NTA agrees to that, he said.

“Advertising is not an impediment or an issue,” he said. “Where it is useful we put it in. Where it is not, we do not.”

Brian Stanley, the Sinn Féin TD, asked Creegan whether providing bus shelters could be devolved to councils and the NTA could just give them cash.

Creegan said they had done that with funding for upgrades. “We have given an allocation of €500,000 this year for every council in the country to progress a bus stop enhancement programme.”

“What we want then is to develop a programme of locations at both bus stops and bus shelters,” he said.

At the Fingal council meeting, Mary Daly, the council’s head of operations, said that council traffic engineers engage with the NTA on bus stops all the time. But managing and maintaining bus stops isn’t a council job, she said.

Nevertheless, councillors backed Humphreys’s motion.