Dublin City, pee-stained and joyless

52 July-August 2023 July-August 2023 PB

just visionless, pedestrian, time-serving, a bit

dull. Unfortunately that’s more of an oering

than their stupid, wrong, visionless, pedestrian,

time-serving, dull, elected colleagues.

Around this time last summer, the then Lord

Mayor, Alison Gilliland, recoiling from the

obvious, ubiquitous and joyless mank,

committed to ramping up night-time power-

washing on city centre streets. “We are lacking

in this area”,she admitted, “and we have to take

immediate action because it’s not doing the

reputation of the city any good”. She was followed

as lord mayor by Caroline Conroy of the ineectual

Green Party whose priority was to be “solving”

the “seriousproblems with waste and clutter” on

the city’s streets.

Conroy hoped to produce an audit of every

street in the city to see what was needed and

what could be taken out. “Our streets are quite

cluttered”, she told The Times. Gilliland and

Conroy both failed abjectly but then again…

Keegan.

Leo Varadkar, desperate we presume, has said

there will be a plebiscite on whether we should

have a directly elected mayor for Dublin, next

year, even though one has been promised for

years, starting with Limerick, with no upshot.

We need an elected mayor with all the powers

currently bestowed on Council Management for

all of Dublin. They should be charged with

advancing the regional quality of life, sustainably,

and they should do it against a hundred clear

indicators, so their success or failure can be

monitored, to inform meaningful elections. And

then Owen Keegan should be dragged in from

retirement in Stillorgan, for just one day, to see

what you can do with power.

Stillorgan to the Civic Oces. But That’s Not

Enough. He became Director of Trac. It was his

level. He called the Pat Kenny Show when the

smug engineering-driven broadcaster claimed he

couldn’t get into a multi-storey car-park,

hammering him as part of the problem – a driver.

That at least was an idea whose time was coming.

But it was his only one.

He quickly got promoted out of Dublin City to

head of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Council where

he cut sta by 28% and was the ﬁrst to privatise

refuse. These were both foolish moves. The

State needs more local government, more

intervention at local level, better public spaces,

better public services, all conducing to better

quality of life. Not worse and fewer ones.

He pioneered a bus corridor, on the N11 from

Stillorgan. It was another outing for his one idea

apart from reflex Thatcherite cuts and

privatisation.

The Department of the Environment loved both

the idea and the reﬂex, and he ascended to boss

of Dublin City Council whereupon he got a naïve

lionisation from Frank McDonald in the Irish

Times. As a reformer. McDonald later suered

buyer’s remorse. There was no reform, no ideas,

an anti-car agenda with no new public transport,

sidestepping of the useless gabbling in the

Council Chamber, a collapse of height standards,

and ﬁlth.

And now he’s gone to be replaced by… well the

favourite is the outgoing head of Dun Laoghaire

Rathdown Council, another man who pushed

(desirable) unplanned cycle routes but left no

other mark.

The allocation of power between elected

representatives and their unelected management

superiors perhaps reﬂects the low calibre of

people now entering local politics (or is it that the

low calibre reﬂects the powerlessness of the

job?).

Most Local Authority Managers (now known as

CEOs) aren’t stupid, they’re not wrong, they’re

ho seems to be in charge of

Dublin? It’s really been Owen

Keegan since 2013. But he

seems long since to have given

up the ghost. He’s the shadow

who blames the homeless, who once spent

€430,000 redesigning Killiney Towers

roundabout, who left no legacy: nothing new like

Temple Bar or Docklands or even something like

the Millennium celebrations, nothing in the

markets area, no new public spaces, nowhere

new to swim: just moveable plant pots and

unplanned cycleways without Environmental

Impact Statements or proper planning

permissions, which risk being undone.

Hotels, student housing, aparthotels: next to

no apartments. And piss-stained fake-granite

pavements.

I ﬁrst met Owen Keegan in 1995. I was

co-organising a conference on Agenda 21 i.e.

sustainability, and he was the Dublin Corporation

guy, assistant manager in charge of housing. The

two of us were meeting the Department of the

Environment’s functionary, the monotoned

Geraldine Tallon, in the Custom House because

together we were organising the conference.

Keegan was the coming man, an economist from

Davy Kelleher McCarthy — the ‘cuts guys’; the

golden boy in the Department of the Environment.

He was sort of sneery about the conference (John

Gormley the Green mayor was pushing it), and he

fawned over Tallon who put a kybosh on any

radical speakers.

Though the Department of the Environment

was to see him through a number of appointment

processes until he reached the apex of the local

authority system as King of Dublin City Council

(remember the Councillors don’t really have much

power), it was dicult to know what the point

was.

Certainly he was a cyclist, wooshing in from

Dublin City, pee-

stained and joyless

Replace CEO with directly elected mayor

charged with monitoring and improving

quality of life

By Michael Smith

Dirty old town

OPINION