Would Blanchardstown benefit from having a town council?

Blanchardstown has never had a town council. But local resident Billy Linehan thinks it could be a good idea, he says.

He argues that Blanchardstown isn’t getting enough attention or resources from Fingal County Council.

“There's just a kind of an imbalance”, he said, with the council focussing more on the county’s coast, rather Dublin 15, on its inland, western side. 

“It's nothing to blame anybody about. It's a historical issue,” he says.

Setting up town councils is something the current programme for government mentions, as part of a stream of work on “strengthening local democracy”.  

The government will, it says “on a regional, phased basis, establish town councils in large towns to provide a focal-point for raising concerns of towns and coordinating town-focused activities”.

In the Dáil earlier this month, Taoiseach Michael Martin, of Fianna Fáil, said that a taskforce set up to look at this – and the structures, functions and financing of local government – would report back in the first three months of next year. 

Town councils used to exist in smaller localities across Ireland – older, traditionally defined locations, says Mark Callanan, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Public Administration, who studies local-government design.

The state got rid of dozens of town councils across the country, under the Local Government Reform Act 2014.

Now that it’s looking at bringing some back, Linehan says he thinks Blanchardstown needs a representative localised body which is smaller and focuses on the community.

He wants Blanchardstown to be somewhere people live in rather than sleep in.

Some current and former councillors for the area say that adding a town council won’t fix that. Others aren’t sure.

The changes

Callanan says that back in 2014, his view had been that there was a strong case for reforming, or at least reorganising, the town council structure. “There were a lot of anomalies.”

One anomaly was that they only covered certain older areas, he said. So, Balbriggan had one, while Blanchardstown didn’t, for example.

So he thinks about that when he hears talk of bringing back town councils, he says. “There might be a case to bring back town councils, but definitely not in the format that they used to exist.”

When it dropped town councils, the government brought in municipal districts in many areas. 

Lots of decisions can be taken at that municipal district level, Callanan said – such as around parking bylaws, and litter management. “The council can also decide to delegate certain divisions as well to municipal districts.”

Meanwhile, in cities and the Dublin region, councils have local area committees, he says. Although, “it’s not quite as formal as the municipal district structure that exists in other country areas”.

One of the key questions for Fine Gael Councillor Ted Leddy is what a Blanchardstown Town Council could do that the current Blanchardstown-Mulhuddart/ Castleknock/ Ongar Area Committee can’t, he says.

He isn’t for or against the idea of a Blanchardstown Town Council at this point, he says. He wants to hear more – but particularly on that.

Solidarity Councillor John Burtchaell said he didn’t have much to say on the subject. “The only point I could make really is that we have a very hollow form of local democracy in Ireland,” he said.

One big difference between the area committees and municipal districts, and the town councils of a decade or so ago, is that the town councils sat outside of the council structure, says Callanan. 

They had their own budgets and different elected representatives, he says.

In 2012, before town councils were abolished “members representing 80 towns containing 14% of the population of the State account for 46% of all councillors, in addition to those towns being represented at county council level”.

Now, with town councils gone, when councillors on local city and county councils have been surveyed about governance, many support more powers through the existing structures, Callanan says.

Why now?

Linehan, the local resident, says he thinks a Blanchardstown Town Council would be better placed to pay attention to issues in the locality. He thinks the local council is slow, and because of that they don’t address local issues quickly.

It would also help to strengthen Blanchardstown’s identity, he says.  

It could run festivals, small public-realm projects and improve community connections, he says. The kinds of things that a town council would do before, he says.

Linehan says he thinks it would also ensure that more resources are funnelled towards the town.

Also, Blanchardstown has grown a lot, he said. Between the 2011 and 2022 censuses, its population has increased from about 68,000 to about 80,000.

Callanan says the question of what scale of representation is the sweet spot is an interesting one.

“It's actually quite hard to come up with a magic number,” he said. “And there have been efforts and lots of international research to try and do that.” 

If there were an effort to create a Blanchardstown Town Council, setting the boundaries of its area would be tricky, says Leddy, the Fine Gael councillor. 

“I'm not exactly sure where Castleknock ends and Blanchardstown begins, or where Mulhuddart begins and Blanchardstown ends,” he said. 

“You know, like I say, they're all lumped together. They're four or five villages, all, you know, all come together,” he said.

 Daniel Whooley, a former Green Party councillor, who lives in the area, says he doesn’t think creating town councils would change anything really.

“This is basically the same thing as a council,” he said. “The same people are represented. What we need is the people who don’t vote.”

To engage younger people, some migrants, renters, people who might not at the moment turn up to meetings in the area, he says. 

Blanchardstown has a particularly low turnout in elections, a sign of disengagement from politics.

In the 2024 local elections, turnout in the Blanchardstown-Mulhuddart local electoral area was only 33 percent – well below the Fingal-wide average of 42 percent, and even further below the national average of about 50 percent.

Whooley says he wants to see people who aren’t so active in the community become more involved, not just more of the same, he says.

“A lot of people I know don’t engage in community groups,” he said. “I think we’ve created a more insular community. A town council doesn’t solve that.”

Community life feels thin in parts of Dublin 15, he says, because of gaps in basic services. 

A lack of youth workers, community spaces, sports funding, and low-barrier activities, says Whooley. Services that austerity hollowed out and that never returned.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.