Fingal network of community groups has been struggling to function due to a shortage of staff and volunteers

Angela Donnelly had been trying to organise a “deputation meeting” with the council for a Clonsilla residents’ association last May.

Meetings like this are useful for residents’ groups, the Dublin 15 Sinn Féin councillor said. “They get to sit in a room with councillors, but also department heads, and speak with them directly.”

The residents group could raise issues like inadequate streetlights or illegal dumping which affect their neighbourhood, she says. “And the benefit of it is that you directly have the ear of the operations department, or whatever other relevant department it may be.”

“It generally does fast-track issues  that you have, because people go in with a can-do attitude,” she says.

But, it was while trying to set the face-to-face up that she hit a wall, she says. “I only discovered you can’t organise a deputation without being a member of a PPN [Public Participation Network].”

PPNs gather together community groups in a county into a network. In Fingal, members include the Aer Lingus Bowls Club, African Community Radio, and Ashleigh Residents Association.

These networks are meant to be “the ‘go to’ for all local authorities who wish to benefit from community and voluntary expertise in their area”, according to the Department of Rural and Community Development, which oversees the programme.

And also a way for the community groups to get information and influence policy decisions in their area. In various ways, including through meetings like the one Donnelly was trying to set up for the Clonsilla residents’ association.

The residents’ association had applied to join the Fingal PPN. The trouble was that its application was delayed, Donnelly said.

The Fingal PPN has been blighted by a staffing shortage for almost 20 months, which meant – in particular – that it hasn’t had a “resource officer” since mid-2022.

This had temporarily prevented it from processing new members, and providing support for its representatives and “linkage groups”, according to an open letter published by the PPN’s secretariat last January.

Since then, the council, which hosts the PPN out of its offices in Blanchardstown, has moved to hire a new resource officer for the PPN, and a spokesperson said it’ll get to work hiring a support worker for the network too, after that.

Resource shortages

When Heidi Bedell joined the Fingal PPN’s secretariat last year, the body which oversees the network of 700 members was running low on numbers, she says. “There’s only six secretariat members right now, and there should be twelve.”

They were hard roles to fill because they are voluntary, she says, with this being an issue for PPNs’ nationwide.

According to the Department of Rural and Community Development’s latest annual report on PPNs, of the 337 secretariat positions allocated across the 30 existing networks, 61 of these were vacant in 2022.

Bedell, a manager at Baldoyle Forum and the chairperson for Malahide Tidy Towns, only held the position for a few months due to the intensity of the job during this staffing shortage, she says. “At the time, we had no staff either. No resource worker and at that point no assistant admin worker.”

The PPN should function with three paid staffers, says Bedell, a former Green Party councillor. “That’s a resource worker and two admin workers.”

Staff vacancies had been ongoing since May 2022, said Donnelly, the Sinn Féin councillor, when she addressed a meeting of the PPN. By June 2022, it was running at a reduced capacity, she told the meeting in May 2023, according to draft minutes.

The main reason was the lack of a resource officer. In the previous 12 months, there’d been two unsuccessful drives by then to hire someone, Donnelly said.

The role of a resource officer is to “basically carry out the works programme for the PPN, book rooms, organise meetings, communicate with members and are the liaison between PPN linkage groups and the council,” says Bedell.

And on 19 January 2023, in a Facebook post, the network’s secretariat confirmed that it was without not only a resource worker, but also a support worker. It was working with the council to address the issue, the post said.

“In the meantime, some areas will be operationally impacted, i.e., no new PPN members will be able to be processed, no staffing support for PPN representatives and linkage Groups, and May’s scheduled plenary is not guaranteed to go ahead,” it said.

Co-operating with the council

When Donnelly, the Sinn Féin councillor, addressed the network in late May 2023, she said the network was being maintained by two members of Fingal County Council’s administrative staff.

These, a council spokesperson said, are a part-time assistant staff officer and full-time staff officer.

After the two failed efforts at hiring a resource officer for the Fingal PPN, the PPN asked the council to increase the pay it was offering for the position – by upgrading the position from a grade five to a grade six worker, the payscale for a senior staff officer.

The council agreed to this, and also appointed a facilitator to assist the PPN, Donnelly said.

But there were other issues too, besides the staffing shortage.

In her May 2023 address to the meeting, Donnelly said the PPN’s secretariat had no access to the PPN’s email account, and so couldn’t communicate directly with the network’s members.

The council owns the PPN’s membership database, says Bedell. “It’s on the council server and that makes it subject to the council’s policy for GDPR. And it’s very tight, obviously.”

The secretariat needs to own the database, Bedell says. “So that it’s on the PPN’s server, accessible by the PPN and shared with the council.”

“At the moment, the secretariat cannot email the members. They have to go through a Fingal staff member. That caused difficulty,” she said.

However, it isn’t fair to heap the blame on one body or another, Bedell says. “The council have been trying their damndest to keep the PPN going.”

Covid impacted their ability to recruit staff, she says. “It was a bit of a perfect storm. It was just really unlucky that we lost our resource worker and didn’t recruit fast enough, and the secretariat had unfilled places.”

According to the Department of Rural and Community Development’s annual report on PPN’s, in 2022, recruitment of staff was a widespread issue with vacancies taking an average of four months to fill.

Signs of improvement

The staffing shortage was still a problem when the PPN’s most recent plenary meeting was held, on 28 November 2023, says Angela Rogers, a member of the PPN’s secretariat.

At that meeting, the secretariat gave the members a chance to vote on whether it wanted the PPN to continue being hosted by the council, she said.

The options were either to remain with the council, to find another organisation to host them or become an independent company limited by guarantee, she said.

“The members voted by an overwhelming majority to remain hosted by Fingal County Council,” she said.

Rogers said this decision was reached on the condition that the PPN engage an independent facilitator to work with the council in drawing up a Service Level Agreement  – a contract which sets out what service one party is expected to deliver to a second party.

Now with a clear mandate from its members, things are progressing, Rogers says. There were interviews earlier this month for the position of resource officer, and hopes the successful candidate will be in place in February.

“We have no update on the recruitment of a Support Worker,” she said. “But the Secretariat have emphasised the urgency of the recruitment.”

A spokesperson for Fingal County Council said that the support worker vacancy can be considered after they’ve finished recruiting a resource officer.