In Fingal, councillors ponder expanding the Community Car scheme

How can Fingal grow its Community Car programme? Fine Gael Mayor Tom O’Leary wonders.

Councillors got an update on the scheme – among other transport projects – at their Balbriggan area committee meeting on Thursday. 

In 2025 alone, the Community Car, which is based in Skerries, provided over 1,500 trips, said Stephen McGinn, an active travel officer for Fingal County Council, by phone, after the meeting.

They have about 15 volunteers, McGinn said. So doing the maths, that’s approximately 100 trips per volunteer in a single year.

The service provides lifts for free to people who need them, like to hospital appointments, to pension and banking services, to visit nursing homes. 

A lady I knew, they used to bring her to mass because she was, you know, had difficulty getting there,” O’Leary said.

It’s meant to fill a gap in rural areas, and it relies on those volunteers, McGinn said. It’s a joint project by Fingal County Council, Transport for Ireland’s Local Link service, the car-sharing company GoCar, and volunteers.

The Community Car isn’t just about transportation, though, McGinn said. “It's linked, obviously, to transportation.” But, he said, volunteers also provide lifts in order to build relationships.

“When they're in the car with someone, and, you know, they're interested to hear about their day,” he said. “They're interested to talk to them. It’s, it’s more, it’s more of that kind of social piece.”

So yeah, it’s working swimmingly in Skerries, he said, it’s a great service.

But at the moment, there’s only the one Community Car serving all of Fingal.

O’Leary, a Fine Gael councillor, has ideas on how to grow the scheme. And so do fellow councillors, including Sinn Féin’s Michael Smyth, and Fianna Fáil’s Darragh Butler.  

###Beginnings 

Fingal’s Community Car initiative started in 2019 as a pilot programme. 

It’s an electric car, that’s part of it. Originally it came about via a climate action grant, it’s always been an EV.

It went well, though, so the council made it permanent, McGinn said. 

At first, there were two cars: one in Skerries, one in Howth. Then came the pandemic.

“During Covid-19, both cars really struggled. Because people didn't want to be in confined spaces with people that they didn't know,” McGinn said. “And volunteer levels dropped off.”

“We were able to revive Skerries, because we had such a strong volunteer base in Skerries. But unfortunately, we couldn't, we couldn't get the volunteer network up and running again in Howth.”

And that was that. Now there’s just one car for Fingal– though that’s a lot, it works. But he said they learned from that.  

“You can have the funding for the car and you can have the funding for the operational costs, but if you don't have the volunteer network, and you don't have a scheme, it doesn't, it doesn't work,” McGinn said. 

Kildare has started a similar scheme, and McGinn said they get calls from other councils, asking how they made it work. 

###(Re) Expanding

O’Leary has a few ideas himself for how to grow the Fingal Community Car scheme. He wants a dedicated online platform to organise the rides, for example. 

Right now, people book through Local Link, McGinn said, and yes the backend takes a lot of work, especially considering it’s for one car.

O’Leary also wants there to be a physical hub for the service, an office space, provided by the council.

“And instead of just having one car in Skerries, why can't we have a fleet of six?” he said. “I'm just pulling a number, six – across Fingal and different locations. I think it'll work much better then, and they can all help each other.”

Smyth, the Sinn Féin councillor, said he’d like to see more people using it, so it’s not a service oriented around older people. He said some disabled people will never be able to use public transport independently.

"For people with intellectual disabilities, who don't have transport, it would give them a complete ... it would be a lifeline to them to be able to engage in more proper kind of community integration,” he said. 

There’s students who would benefit from this too, Smyth said.

"I had hoped that we could use it, or services could use it... for certain schools,” he said. “Who will be supporting people with, say, autism, who can't use traditional transport, but don't have transport in there as connected to their package."

Fianna Fáil Councillor Darragh Butler said there are certain areas in Fingal that really need access to a Community Car service, he said, like Knocksedan.

"I suppose it's always a challenge. The more rural, the more isolated parts of North County Dublin and Fingal, kind of connecting them to a bus services… it can be difficult,” Butler said. “but, you know, efforts like this go a long way to achieve that."

He said that if expanding the Community Car scheme requires it, maybe they need to look beyond volunteers. "Maybe it could be, you know, there could be paid drivers as well to be involved in it,” he said.

For their part, McGinn, the active travel officer at the council, said council staff have been thinking about how to fund an expansion of the scheme. 

“We're trying to figure out a funding model that would allow us to scale the community car to other areas as well. And so we're working away on that in the background, and we're making good headway,” he said. 

###Seeking volunteers

In the meantime, the council has been fine-tuning how the Skerries Community Car works. 

They’ve rejiggered how they organise volunteers recently, so that instead of taking on trips on an ad-hoc basis, volunteers sign up for certain hours, McGinn said. 

McGinn said people volunteer to make connections, to reduce the chances of social isolation for people. 

“And that's..  you can only really do that when you know someone. So by building those relationships, it's probably pivotal to the success of it,” he said. 

He said they’re always looking for more volunteers, and yes they did try an advertising campaign and it wasn’t that fruitful, but he said the real key is that volunteers bring more volunteers. That’s how they get them.

“It's really, it's kind of helped to build it into it, like the true nature of a community car,” McGinn said. 

But “We are always looking for volunteers. Because, you know, you can, you can probably never have enough, really, right?” he said.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.