Councillor Eibhlin Byrne (Fianna Fáil) was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin at the Annual Meeting of Dublin City Council on 30th June 2008.

Cllr. Byrne was co-opted to the City Council seat vacated by Sandra Geraghty in 2002 and was re-elected to represent the Clontarf Ward in 2004, which includes Fairview, Donnycarney and Marino. Cllr. Byrne is married to Ken and has three daughters Clare, Lisa and Aisling.

The Lord Mayor has held distinguished positions in advocacy throughout her career to date and is currently employed by the Daughters of Charity Child & Family Services, who offer therapeutic and counselling services to children and their families. She is a Senior Manager with responsibility for 10 family centres around the city.

Prior to this she held the position of Head of Communication, Advocacy & Policy at Depaul Trust homeless service, from 2003 to 2006, whilst concurrently holding the Chair of the National Council on Ageing and Older People. Before these appointments the Lord Mayor was a teacher and also ran language programmes between Irish students and young people in France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Her responsibilities have included being a member of Housing Strategic Policy Group that has special responsibility for housing and social affairs. She is on the Lord Mayor’s Commission on Crime, (2004) and the Lord Mayor’s Commission on Older People, (2006).

Cllr. Byrne is on the Dublin Regional Authority and the Dublin Bay Taskforce which is charged with review of proposals for the amenity area of Dublin Bay and is also a member of the Dublin City Fairtrade Steering Group, to help establish Dublin as an official Fairtrade City.

In a personal capacity, the Lord Mayor is a Board member of Console, which is an organisation under the patronage of President Mary McAleese, set up by the families of those bereaved through suicide.

I asked Eibhlin Byrne for her views on the current Dublin Docklands Development Authority proposals for the Poolbeg peninsula and she explained that the City council have bought into the whole idea of the Dublin Bay Taskforce as a member of Dublin Regional Authority.

“The port is an amenity for the entire city and further beyond,” she said. “I think it sends out an entirely wrong message for the Dublin Docklands to go ploughing ahead while the task force is in operation. I think there should be a moratorium on anything to do with the bay now until the findings of the Taskforce are published.”

She said, in response to the point that Dublin is somewhat over-developed causing a water shortage and that the Waste Water treatment plant is at full capacity: “What we need to do is to stand back, in terms of the bay, look at everything, whether it be wildlife, population, questions of drainage, sewage, any of those questions, we are going to have to have an integrated approach to the Bay. It is going to have to be a planned approach and the Taskforce is going to be reporting in nine months. It’s not as if it will be five years before it reports, so I do not see the need for a massive rush forward to development unless the reason to dash forward with development is to get in ahead of the Taskforce and in that case then we would need to question why we would be doing that rather than waiting for the Taskforce report,” she said.

We moved the discussion onto the subject of Fairtrade, as Cllr Byrne is on the Fairtrade Steering Group, and she said: “The City now has Fairtrade status and the next thing is to get it as widely accepted around the City as possible, to support Fairtrade so that we increase the products that come in, that’s the important thing.

“In the early days of Fairtrade, part of the problem was that people didn’t like the chocolate or the coffee. However, they have been hugely refined and people are more and more mainstreaming Fairtrade.”

She continued, “I don’t think we can sit back from raising consciousness about Fairtrade, about helping people to understand it, as there are those who are still opposed and would argue against it so I think there is a duty of the City Council to promote it.”

Lord Mayor Eibhlin Byrne is optimistic that with a change of leadership in her party they are entering into a new era of politics. “I’d like to think that we are all moving into the twenty-first century, it’s about issues now.”

She spoke about Brian Cowen’s background coming from the Finance ministry and said “He should have an understanding of current challenges and bear in mind that the Taoiseach is not a Dublin Taoiseach and that will bring its own challenges for us in Dublin. As with every job, he should be given a chance to settle in.”

Cllr Byrne says that she got involved with politics to achieve change from within. When she was a student she took part in the protests about the City Council’s Wood Quay Civic Offices and now finds herself the Lord Mayor. “In my twenties I protested at the Civic Offices and that is symbolic as now I’m in the Civic Offices and that’s the journey I’ve made.”

Above: Lord Mayor Eibhlin Byrne with Enda Connellan of Dublin Port at the South Docks Festival.