FAREWELL TO THE FOUR: KILDARE’S TOWN COUNCILS GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Farewell to the four: Kildare’s town councils gone but not forgotten 

Liam Kenny

This issue of the paper will see the last reporting from four town councils in Co Kildare whose meetings and debates – from the largely purposeful to the occasionally raucous – have filled miles of column inches.

The four Town Councils in the county – Athy, Naas, Newbridge and Leixlip –  merge with the County Council at the end of the month under the local government reforms. Each had nine councillors whose monthly meetings were reported at length in the newspaper and presented a transparent picture of local authority activities in the main towns.

And two of the four town councils will leave footnotes for the record in the history of local government at national level. Naas will forever be noted as the last town council to have had its members suspended from office when they refused to pass a budget in 1985-88. No other Town Council has been suspended since. And Leixlip holds the record of being Ireland’s newest Town Council having been created as recently as 1988.

Old or young, the dynamic of the Town Councils will not die entirely. Much of their concerns will continue in the new Municipal Districts whose elections are being reported in this issue within the coverage of the Kildare County Council election.

In valedictory speeches for the winding-up town councils some historians have claimed links for Athy and Naas going back to the chartered towns established by the Normans more than six hundred years ago.  However comparing these ancient regal creations with the modern Town Councils is like comparing apples and oranges. The old charters which governed Athy and Naas had no democratic opportunity for the ordinary people to influence the government of the town and instead created conditions for an elite to supervise all town business – sometimes to their own advantage. The corruption of the old Corporation in Naas became so notorious that in 1840 it was abolished after a damning report alleged that the proceeds of the town’s lands and tolls were being appropriated by Lord Mayo of Palmerstown House who had appointed family members to the majority of seats on the Naas corporation.

The roots of the Town Councils as known in modern times are entirely more democratic and were largely based in 19th century legislation which aimed to put the rate payers – initially the shop-keepers – in charge. In time this evolved to include all residents.

Athy historian and councillor Frank Taaffe has written that effective town local government began in 19th century Athy under the first recognisably democratic piece of town government legislation, the Lighting of Towns Act 1828. The town’s capacity in local government terms was boosted with the establishment of the Urban District Council in April 1900 and it is essentially this body which is being merged into the Kildare County Council. One of the first tasks of the newly constituted council in 1900 was to offer “a fee of £10 to Engineers for the best plan for the reconstruction of the sewerage system for Athy.”  This early initiative reflected one of the biggest challenges faced by all urban councils – the provision of clean water and effective sanitation for the towns where water-borne diseases were cutting gaps through the population. However, there was surprising resistance to the plans to improve public health. Not alone were some councillors opposed to such projects because they raised the rates bill for the shop-keepers, but in Athy a public referendum in 1901 produced an almost two to one vote against a properly engineered water supply scheme leaving townspeople to depend on insanitary shallow wells – a practice which was not remedied for another six years until resistance was overcome and a proper water scheme commissioned.

In participation terms Athy urban council was the springboard for Kildare’s first woman councillor. Miss Brigid Darby, a teacher at Churchtown, was elected to the urban council in 1928 and six years latere made the breakthrough to the County Council, the first female to be elected since the county body was established in 1899.

Naas Urban District Council had its roots in mid19th century legislation under which elected Town Comissioners were formed and convened for the first time in 1855. An exceptional feature of the Naas arrangement was the generous scope of the town boundary which was fixed as a circle with a radius extending for one-and-a-half miles from the centre point between the piers of the old gaol – this is a point on the steps of the modern Naas Town Hall. Most town councils had tight boundaries which clung to old building lines but the Naas town boundary extended well into the rural environs and indeed up to recent years Naas town council was the only one in Ireland which could claim to have two stud farms within the town boundary.

Newbridge Town Council traces its inception to Town Commissioners set up in 1865 following a ratepayers’ meeting in the Court House. Research by historian Mario Corrigan records that there was heated debate as to whether a town council should be established at all.  Some saw the advantages of the services which could be provided by a local council such as street cleaning; others feared the burden on local rates. In the end a narrow majority agreed to proceed with setting up a town commission.

Leixlip Town Council is the baby of them all having been the last of just a handful of new town authorities established in the twentieth century. Historian and former Town Commission member John Colgan has documented the tortuous process from the early 1970s where residents of the fast growing commuter town campaigned for a better say in local planning and development matters. After many long nights of campaigns, petitions and meetings, the Leixlip Town Council was inaugurated in 1988 bringing to four the number of town councils in Kildare.

This pattern of town government in the County comes to an end this week but the history of the town councils is secure … a look back through the issues of this paper over the past century  will reveal the proceedings of the town councillors recorded in glorious detail for posterity. Leinster Leader 27 May 2014, Looking Back Series no: 384.