Royston Brady as “Most Successful Lord Mayor” (Letter to Journalist/Editor)
Mr Liam Collins,
Sunday Independent,
Dear Mr Collins,
I write further to your article in the Sunday Independent (24th October) concerning the former Lord Mayor of Dublin, Royston Brady.
Now the travails of Mr Brady do not concern me – except in so far as the obscene amounts of money spent on his European Election campaign may start a worrying trend.
As someone equally honoured to have served as Lord Mayor of Dublin I am however both disturbed and annoyed at your description “the most successful Lord Mayor in recent years”. Disturbed and annoyed because I see the position of Lord Mayor as a political post which was devalued consistently and repeatedly during that year when appearing in VIP was more important than any serious contribution to the future of Dublin.
Was it “successful” to fail to attend most City Council meetings, during the term of office, especially given that the actual job to which the Lord Mayor is elected is Chairperson of the City Council ?
Perhaps you mean that it was “successful” to refer to his then colleagues on the City Council as “Clowns”?
Or maybe it was “successful” to not even have the courtesy to attend the formal handing over of the Mansion House to his successor.
Maybe you consider his rantings about the Minister for Justice a “success”? Personally I would prefer the approach of the present Lord Mayor Michael Conaghan, who three months into the job has managed to meet Minister Mc Dowell, establish a Commission on Policing and is already making a substantial input into policing in Dublin through the arts of politics and not media stunts.
Maybe your consider it a “success” to simply fail to turn up at events that you had agreed to attend and for which the organisers had usually put an enormous amount of time and energy into organising.
Or indeed broken commitments to appoint a Deputy for an event only to withdraw this on the morning of the function?
Maybe you consider the darkened doors of the Mansion House for much of that year to be “successful”?
I would challenge you, or any other journalist, to compare my diary and that of the previous ten Lords Mayor with Mr Brady’s. I would challenge you to ask yourself honestly whether his stunt in holding a wedding for two homeless people was more beneficial than my championing and eventually the opening of a new Wet Hostel for Homeless People. At my own expense I travelled to meet the Irish homeless community in London to try and bring back some of their stories towards the development of an appropriate response here in Dublin. I didn’t seek, or gain, any publicity for this. It was part of the job of doing what was best for Dublin.
I was proud to be the first Lord Mayor of Dublin, in over 70 years, to lay a wreath at the War memorial at the Somme, the first Lord Mayor to host a reception for the survivors of the Dublin Fusiliers, while at the same time accepting an invitation from Sinn Fein, to attend an event marking the problems experienced by members of the Catholic community in Belfast.
I was truly honoured to have accepted and then worked hard to develop the idea of an Irish Holocaust Memorial Day – something which has now effectively been embraced by the State through the involvement of the Department of Justice and the President of Ireland.
On the difficult issue of the adoption of the City Budget I put the needs of the City before my own personal future and did not shirk from the media when explaining it. Though the failure of most of the media to understand the complexity and relevance of the issue was perhaps the most notable feature of that particular period.
I could go on but I hope you get the message. Unlike Mr Brady however I have not forsaken the City Council just because I have already held the position of Lord Mayor and it can be of no further advantage to me.
Local Government needs active committed representatives. It needs to be radically reformed, including the direct election for a five year term of the Lord Mayor of Dublin. It needs the media to report, honestly and accurately on its responsibilities and limitations. It never did and never will need another dose of Mayor by Media and the endless desire to appear in the Social columns.
Dublin, has had many good Lord Mayors, Gay Mitchell, Joe Doyle, Mary Freehill, Sean Loftus, John Gormley to name but some. Your reference to the “most successful” would hardly feature in the top 100 of anyone who cares.
Yours sincerely,
Councillor Dermot Lacey
66 Beech Hill Drive,
Donnybrook,
Dublin 4.
