With journalists and the public shut out of some Fingal council committee meetings, they’re left to rely on terse minutes

When Fingal county councillors voted through new rules last December, banning media from covering their policy committee meetings, they made their council an outlier in the region.

Dublin City, South Dublin, and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown all allow media to watch these meetings.

Their move also left residents and the media more dependent on the minutes of those meetings, to follow debates among elected councillors and officials, and how they are shaping housing, transport, and culture in the area.

But those minutes are often short with little detail.

Labour Party Councillor Brian McDonagh, Fingal’s Lord Mayor, said that sometimes, councillors benefit from not being observed by outside parties.

“Some people would feel you could have a more productive discussion,” he said.

Councillors could ask for the minutes to reflect on what is said in more depth, he said. “But from my point of view, I don’t really want to read the two hours of minute discussion, which are going through.”

A spokesperson for Fingal County Council said that the minutes record decisions taken at a meeting. “They are not intended to be a verbatim record of proceedings.”

Noted, noted

On 5 September last year, a meeting of Fingal County Council’s Planning Strategic Transport and Infrastructure Development Strategic Policy Committee (SPC) kicked off at 4.30pm.

The minutes say that it wrapped up at 6pm. Although, it ran for almost a half an hour longer.

At the time, media were allowed – and so present when, for example, Paul Carroll, a senior engineer in the council’s Planning and Strategic Infrastructure Department gave a 10-minute presentation on greenways and cycle lanes.

Then he fielded queries from councillors, like Fianna Fàil Councillor Tom Kitt and independent Councillor Tania Doyle who asked about where the council was with the delivery of its stretch of the Royal Canal Greenway.

It was a verbal presentation. There weren’t any documents up on the council’s website detailing Carroll’s key points.

The minutes for the meeting condensed these 20 minutes into two sentences.

Carroll gave a presentation on Fingal’s greenways and cycleways to committee members, the minutes said. “Following a discussion the presentation was NOTED.”

What happens in an SPC?

A strategic policy committee is a council committee, whose membership consists of councillors and some stakeholders from the public participation network.

“Their job is to feed in policy recommendations to be approved at the main council,” said McDonagh, the Labour councillor, on Friday.

Unlike an area committee, which hones in on issues by neighbourhood, strategic policy committees thrash out and track progress on council policies in areas such as housing, climate action, transport and culture.

Last term, Fingal County Council had seven strategic policy committees. Generally, they meet every three months.

While in Dublin City Council, these meetings are streamed online on the council’s website for all to watch live, and left there for months for anyone who missed the meeting, in Fingal, the meetings are less transparent.

Some of the committees meet online, others in-person. And until December, members of the public or media could attend Fingal’s strategic policy committee’s through a request to the council’s Corporate Services Department. The committee chairperson would then approve, or reject, that request.

But in December, Fingal’s councillors voted through new “standing orders” for council business – and neither the media nor the public were allowed to attend SPC meetings anymore.

Some councillors have said they didn’t notice this particular change in the standing orders when they voted.

It was put into the rules without being explained, says Green Party Councillor David Healy, the former chair of the Climate Action Strategic Policy Committee.

“I don’t know why that was written up like that,” he said.

McDonagh, the Labour councillor, said the rules could be changed if a councillor submitted a motion to amend them and it was agreed.

But, in the eight months since the change, no councillor has done this.

What should be in minutes?

Under the Local Government Act of 2001, minutes are drawn up by a meeting administrator, and should include references to reports submitted to members, votes on a motion, and the particulars of all resolutions passed.

The purpose of the minutes is to record the actions that come out of the committee meeting, McDonagh says. “So, it’s what is going to happen as a result of those pieces.”

They record if a policy is being recommended to another committee, he says. “A lot of the important stuff will get noted or passed on.”

The minutes kept at Fingal County Council’s meetings for their strategic policy committees generally make for a quick read.

Discussions at its Housing Strategic Policy Committee meetings in 2023 are generally, in the minutes, boiled down to one of two statements.

Either, “Following the discussion, the presentation was noted” or in the case of a motion, they said if the council’s responding report was accepted or agreed by the committee.

Only one of 22 agenda items in minutes for the 2023 meetings gave a sliver more of an impression than the others into what was said.

This was when, on 27 March 2023, a motion by Solidarity Councillor John Burtchaell was proposed under the title “Response to lifting the eviction ban”.

Burtchaell had asked for the council’s Chief Executive Annmarie Farrelly to increase available funding for the purchase of tenant occupied properties and the number of additional emergency accommodation spaces in light of the government’s lifting of the ban.

But the minutes didn’t share the specifics of the motion. It only included a table recording how councillors voted.

The minutes for Fingal’s other strategic policy committees are more insightful, albeit some only moderately so.

Those for Fingal’s Community, Development, Heritage Culture and Creativity SPCs do note what was talked about, key points in presentations, and comments from committee members.

The Transport and Infrastructure Management Strategic Policy Committee kept more detailed minutes for half of last term, then trailed off in December 2022.

The Climate Action SPC minutes vary in detail.

In one meeting on 22 September 2021, the note-taker recorded the discussion around seven motions by saying, “various members spoke to motion”.

On 19 December 2023, the only window into the feelings of committee members was when they commended the great work being done by Fingal’s biodiversity officer in the context of the council’s Biodiversity Action Plan, 2022 to 2030.

Could they be clearer?

Healy, the Green Party councillor, says the council can be slow to publish minutes too.

“I remember looking for things from another SPC and realising they were three meetings behind, before actually putting up the minutes, which of course, is almost a year,” he said.

McDonagh, the Labour councillor, says that strategic policy committees aren’t like the monthly full council meetings or the Dáil, where the discussions are a matter of public record.

“I think there’s some instances where councillors prefer to have open and frank internal discussions with stakeholders,” he said.

He doesn’t himself want to read through minutes that contain the minutiae of an SPC’s discussion, he says.

Ultimately, what details are shared from these discussions are up to the members themselves to decide upon, he says.

“So if there is anything that anybody wants to be said, it is entirely up for them to do so,” he said.