“How this has been managed is an absolute joke,” said a frustrated Lord Mayor Ray McAdam.
Only five councillors were able to pose questions to officials at Dublin City Council’s annual climate action meeting before Lord Mayor Ray McAdam had to step in.
Already, officials had received more than 20 queries in the chamber at City Hall on Monday evening.
They were on issues like active travel and sustainable drainage systems, said Dermot Collins, the assistant chief executive in charge of environment and transportation. “Some generic questions, and some very detailed questions.”
But, from that first batch, Patricia Reidy, the executive manager for climate action had said five times what would become the standard reply of the night: somebody from the relevant department would get back to the councillor who’d asked the question with an answer.
Climate touches every single department and section, Reidy said, quickly addressing the fact that a lot of managers were absent. “Certainly, it wasn’t possible to bring everybody here tonight.”
After a few questions were completely skipped over, while others were met with the same response, McAdam, a Fine Gael councillor, deemed it necessary to briefly halt the proceedings.
The meeting would be paused for five minutes, he said, both visibly and audibly ticked off. “Because how this has been managed is an absolute joke.”
These meetings were an important way of keeping all councillors up to speed on the council’s Climate Action Plan, said Green Party councillor Janet Horner, speaking by phone on Tuesday.
It shouldn’t be a meeting in which senior managers aren’t present to address councillors’ concerns, she said, “while all the senior staff get to come in and show us pictures of the cute flowers in the park”.
“It should be a night where every senior manager has to account for data, spending and progress,” she said. “They’re trying to sell us on what they have done.”
A spokesperson for Dublin City Council did not respond when asked on Tuesday morning why senior staff were ill-equipped to answer a large number of questions from councillors, and for a timeline on when these queries would be addressed.
Dublin City Council’s annual special meeting on climate action is intended to give elected members an insight into how the council is implementing its Climate Action Plan for 2024 to 2029.
That plan sets out how the council aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 51 percent by 2030, and achieve neutrality by 20250, according to the council’s website.
In all, the plan lists 121 actions across all of the council’s departments, said Reidy, the council’s executive manager for climate action. “As reported, over 90 percent of these actions are progressing.”
Councillors were given five presentations – on housing, waste, parks, drainage and active travel – and across them there were a number of updates on the plethora of schemes and initiatives.
The council had 11 active travel schemes ready to enter the construction stage by mid-2027, adding 13 kilometers onto the existing 38 kilometres in the city’s active travel network, according to active travel slides.
Department of Housing funding allocation for the energy efficiency retrofitting remained at its 2024 level of €10.71 million, said senior executive engineer Shane Hawkshaw. “The cost will increase with the funding technically decreased.”
And, while the council was cutting back on projects under its “adaptive reuse scheme”, in which they convert vacant offices and commercial properties into social homes, they had appointed a design team for one of its schemes on Fitzwilliam Quay.
The scheme was continuing, but at a slower pace, said Ruth Dowling, the executive manager for housing delivery. “It’s really focused on some of those sites that have a higher yield.”
Councillors began to express their confusion with how the meeting was being run, first with Horner, the Green Party councillor, asking councillors had not received any reports to read prior to the meeting.
“We normally get all reports in advance of any council meetings,” she said, before the reports were distributed more than a half an hour later via email.
Once the presentations were completed, and councillors started to ask their questions, the sheer repetition of the answers sent the mood southward.
Could councillors get a geographical spread of the housing retrofit phases? asked People Before Profit Councillor Conor Reddy. “It’d be interesting to see where it has been hit so far and where it hasn’t.”
That was something the housing department would get back to him on, said the city architect Andrew Devenport.
Sinn Féin Councillor Edel Moran asked for an update on air quality monitoring around Dublin Airport. “It’s an ongoing concern for a couple of the residents,” she said.
Paul Rutherford, the principal environmental health officer in the Air Quality Monitoring and Noise Control Unit would get back to her on that, Reidy said.
Green Party Councillor Ray Cunningham asked about retrofitting on public buildings, and when electric vehicle chargers were coming to Walkinstown library.
“I’d like to know what the story is with the installation of charging hubs throughout the city?” he said.
Officials would check, Reidy said, “and come back on those answers”.
Councillors asked about speed limits, timelines for retrofitting, waste and recycling, the circular economy, tree pits in the north inner-city, signage in parks, the identification of vacant land for the purpose of community gardens and public lighting plans, all of which received similar replies.
Labour Councillor Darragh Moriarty said it was disappointing that no official had detail on the council’s retrofitting targets. “This is an annual climate action meeting. I think it’s really important that we get detail tonight at the meeting itself.”
Climate action touches on nearly all areas of the council, and for most councillors who aren’t on its particular strategic policy committee, this is the one chance to get updates from officials, he said.
“We keep being told: ‘someone will come back to you on that, someone will come back to you on that,’” he said.
Councillors weren’t receiving a picture of what the council was actually spending on climate action, Green Party Councillor Feljin Jose told the chamber.
The current capital programme for 2025 to 2027 – the budget for building stuff – has an estimated total value of €3.348 billion. But of that, €3.317 billion was labelled as climate action projects, he said.
“That looks great, until you look into it and it says: works to a car park was included,” he said.
If the council isn’t actually measuring what it spends, it can’t measure the progress, he said. “A lot of these newer projects that we are doing does include climate action measures that may not have been there five or 10 years ago.”
“But you can’t put the entire cost of a project into the climate action budget just because there were LED lights used,” he said.
Data and budgets are two things that are not being included here, said Horner, the Green Party councillor, at the meeting, and without those it is impossible to gauge the efficacy of these programmes.
It was concerning that there were a lot of presentations telling councillors what the council was doing right, she said.
“But we are failing to really grasp the massive role we still have to go, the enormity of action that is needed, and the serious commitment of budget when we can’t just throw everything … under the category of climate action.”
As the meeting drew to a close, Green Party Councillor Claire Byrne said she appreciated that this climate action plan was only a year old.
“But this is the second climate action plan, and I do find it concerning that we still haven’t figured out a way to measure, monitor and report the impact of the actions,” she said.
They would come back to her on that, Reidy said.
Researchers say the role of crowdfunding platforms in the spread of harmful ideologies is largely overlooked.
But so far this year, Dublin City Council has only issued two fines for dog fouling, according to a council spokesperson.
But why are so many of them in the south-east area of Pembroke? asked one councillor.
“We are approaching the point (if we’re not already there) where we can justifiably claim that competition has failed,” says Labour energy spokesperson Ciarán Ahern.
