A car horn beeps as Green Party TD Brian Leddin walks through Limerick where voters will soon choose Ireland’s first directly elected mayor.
“Go on the Greens. I love you so much,” a driver yells, apparently tongue-in-cheek.
“My number one supporter,” Leddin quips.
The man continues: “He’s actually one of the better candidates by the way, not that that’s a hotly contested position. I might give you a number 12, Brian.”
Leddin laughs. “That might actually count in the end. It’ll all come down to transfers,” he replies.
On Friday, June 7th – on the same day voters across the country will elect representatives to local councils and the European Parliament – the people of Limerick will have an additional choice; they will cast votes to select a mayor to lead a council that provides services to almost 210,000 people across the city and county.
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It comes five years after a plebiscite that saw voters approve the creation of the office of a directly elected mayor. Similar proposals in Cork and Waterford were defeated.
The job comes with a salary of just more than €154,000, five staff and a budget of €8 million a year to be spent on mayoral projects and initiatives.
The most significant power the mayor will have is proposing the annual budget for Limerick City and County Council. This will still have to be approved by councillors.
The sums involved are considerable.
The council’s draft budget for 2024 included €249 million for day-to-day services and €460 million for capital projects including housing and roads.
The new mayor will also propose the five-year Local Development Plan and will have access to Cabinet Ministers with a set number of meetings each year.
What they will not be is a North American-style mayor with major powers in areas such as policing or running public transport and schools.
Local Sinn Féin TD Maurice Quinlivan claimed last year that the legislation underpinning the office was “very disappointing for most people in Limerick”. He said the mayor should have sufficient powers to ensure it “would not just be a ribbon-cutting position”.
Sinn Féin has not yet selected a candidate; nor has Fine Gael or Labour.
Leddin (44) defends the role and believes it can have clout in two of the big issues facing Limerick: health and housing.
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He says the “crisis” in the emergency department at University Hospital Limerick could be raised directly with the Minister by the mayor who will have an “incredibly strong mandate”.
Leddin says any Minister would be “very foolish” to ignore someone representing 210,000 people as there would be “blowback” for them and their party.
On housing, he says the mayor will be able to propose changes to the development plan to “zone for more houses in the right places”.
He says there needs to be a lot more people living in the city centre and more broadly Leddin believes Limerick can grow to be a “counterweight” to Dublin. As he sees it, the mayoral office offers the opportunity to plan for that.
The role of mayor is also a work in progress: it will be reviewed after three years to see how it is working and if more power can be devolved.
People Before Profit’s candidate Ruairí Fahy is sceptical of the powers the mayor will have in housing. He believes the Government “set it [the office] up to fail”.
Fahy (32) highlights how the new Local Development Plan will not be brought in for another four years and says any proposals on zoning would have to be aligned with national policy.
Limitations of the office notwithstanding, one of the main priorities for Fahy, who says he would take the average industrial wage if elected, would be to “build up trade union rights”.
He suggests companies that work with unions should be given preferential treatment when it comes to council contracts.
“I want to rebuild like the spirit of the Limerick Soviet in 1919,” he says.
Perhaps the most high-profile candidate in the race is former Department of Finance secretary general John Moran who is running as an Independent.
The Irish Times meets him in an office attached to a 19th-century Presbyterian church he bought during the pandemic to “save the building”.
One potential use he sees for it is as a home for his RHH institute, a think tank that would look at national issues “from outside the bubble in Dublin”.
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He says working on the building was “a bit of a chemo project”. Moran got the “all-clear” last year after being diagnosed with cancer in 2022.
Why does he want to be mayor?
“There is no place I’d like to make a difference than here in Limerick. It’s home. It’s been very good to me,” he says.
Moran (58) adds he does not want the new office to fail as it could offer an example for other places to follow to “break the centralisation of Government” in Ireland.
He says the budgetary powers are “very significant” and they would be proposed in line with what the people wanted when they selected a mayor: “So it’s politics and finance coming together at a local authority level in ways we’ve never seen before.”
He says his career in public policy and financing means “I know I can make a difference in bringing all of that to bear on this role”.
In 2022 there was controversy over lobbying Moran carried out for US cab-hailing company Uber, as reported by The Irish Times. He argues it was a “sideshow” connected to an international story.
Moran says he would not be doing consulting work if elected mayor. He has stepped away from boards of charities in receipt of council funding and is resigning from the boards of Shannon Airport and the Limerick Economic Forum.
Fianna Fáil’s candidate Dee Ryan, who is departing as Limerick Chamber chief executive to run for mayor, says health, housing and economic development are the big issues.
She concedes there is no direct function in some of those areas but says the mayor can be “a critical convener” and “advocate” for the delivery of all Government services.
Ryan (48) suggests there should be new powers in education, saying she would like to see all secondary students in the county learn to drive, sew and cook before they leave school.
Ryan, formerly a member of the Labour Party and before that Fine Gael, made the headlines recently when years-old social media posts emerged in which she had criticised Fianna Fáil and party leader Micheál Martin.
She says her views have changed and Fianna Fáil is “absolutely the right fit for me” and it was Martin’s time as taoiseach during the pandemic that “caused me to look at the party differently”.
Another candidate from a Fine Gael gene pool is Helen O’Donnell who was married to the late TD, minister and MEP, Tom O’Donnell.
She is running as an Independent despite her seconding of current MEP Seán Kelly to stand for Fine Gael just weeks ago.
O’Donnell (63) describes Kelly as a friend and he knew she would be launching her non-party mayoral campaign the following day.
On why she is not running for Fine Gael, she says she believes the role of mayor should be “above party politics”.
“If you go into a council with 40 councillors . . . and you’re aligned to one party, I think you will not have the same strength,” she says.
O’Donnell ran a catering business in Limerick for decades, is active in the Tidy Towns and previously chaired the board of all-island body Safe Food.
She says she would bring such experience to the role of mayor and Limerick is “crying out for leadership, vision and direction”.
In recent days two more candidates have entered the race: Sarah Beasley of Aontú, who has been praised by party leader Peadar Tóibín for her outreach work with homeless people, and public health scientist Dr Laura Keyes who is running for Green Left party Rabharta.
Another candidate, Social Democrats councillor Elisa O’Donovan (41) grew up in London with Irish parents.
Her family moved back to Limerick when she was a teenager but she has faced some online abuse over her accent.
O’Donovan has previously clashed with mayoral race rival Leddin. He previously apologised after derogatory remarks he made about O’Donovan in a WhatsApp group emerged in 2021. She did not accept the apology at the time.
Both candidates focused on what their priorities would be as mayor in their interviews with The Irish Times rather than on their old dispute.
O’Donovan says safety within communities was a significant issue in Limerick, as is a lack of public amenities such as swimming pools and these areas would be priorities for her as mayor.
She believes there should be more supports, including social workers and advocates, within the council for people seeking to access housing.
Rejecting criticisms of the limitations to the mayoral powers, she insisted that greater democracy was “a good thing”.
Her first ever vote aged 18 was for Ken Livingstone, the first directly mayor in London, she says.
“I remember exactly the same arguments coming up then and the mayor made that position what they wanted to make it.”
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