‘Now is the time’ - Calls made for restoration of Kilkenny Borough Council

The Kilkenny City authority was dissolved in 2014

Published 1st Jul 2026, 18:00 BST Kilkenny County Hall The Kilkenny City authority was dissolved in 2014 Sign up to our Kilkenny Live newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know you can manage your profile, and explore all of the available newsletters from Kilkenny Live within your account.

With the question of local government reform fully back in the spotlight and the publishing of the Local Democracy Taskforce’s report imminent, calls are being made for the restoration of Kilkenny ’s historic status and a return of the Borough Council.

The Taskforce has spent the last year working on a plan to reform and strengthen local government in the country, and presented this to Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, James Browne TD, in March.

The Minister’s office will now consider the recommendations and develop an implementation plan with Carlow/Kilkenny TD, John McGuinness, believing that now is the time to push for a return to the old system in Kilkenny City.

The Local Government Reform Act of 2014 dissolved many town and city councils across the country, replacing them with municipal districts, something which Deputy McGuinness lamented in a Dáil debate this week, saying: “Kilkenny City survived Cromwell, but it didn’t survive recent local government legislation that reduced it from being a city to a borough.”

Speaking to the Kilkenny People, Deputy McGuinness described what he sees as the decline in democratic representation and powers from the Borough Council to the City Municipal District, which resulted in the number of city councillors reducing from 12 to seven.

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“In the past, the Borough Council, or the Corporation as it was known, would have had their own budgets, they had their own decision-making powers, they had powers for ceremonial purposes as well, and the mayor was always the first citizen,” he outlined.

“All of that changed and it has pushed out democracy from the centre of Kilkenny in my opinion so the only way to restore that is to bring back the Borough Council, allow the public to elect 12 members and for the budgets to be dealt with by the members along with all other powers.”

The stripping of the city’s traditional civic status to a ceremonial one within a wider county council particularly rankled many within Kilkenny while multiple other large towns also lost their councils.

Deputy McGuinness believes this has not been for the benefit of local democracy, and that sweeping national legislation is needed to restore them and their powers during the upcoming reforms.

“My view is that now is the time to discuss once again the city’s status, the Corporation and the powers we once had as a corporation. This was a piece of legislation that affected more than Kilkenny, it affected Clonmel, Dundalk, Wexford; they all had corporations similar to us so you have to have a broad piece of legislation to actually restore what I’m asking for.”

“But if you ask the people of Kilkenny, they will want to see the city’s status restored, that’s what they will ask for.”

“This was something that was coming for a long time because this is the way the officials want it. They want one authority which is Kilkenny County Council, whereas that doesn’t suit the connection that democracy offers between the people that are directly elected and the citizens, in this case, of Kilkenny,” he added.

It seems that the Government may be spending over a year on a taskforce, report and implementation plan just to reform local authorities closer to what they already were pre- 2014, but even so, Deputy McGuinness sees this as a route to improve efficiency and move back towards a preferable system of city management.

“You’d have what we had before, which was a city and county manager in one person,” he explained. “So you’d have administration that’s not being duplicated, but being conducted by the same staff and decision-making powers would be restored to the Borough Council.”

“The power to strike a rate for example, that influences the rates that are being paid by traders. The power to deal with your own budgets; the power to have a budget in the first place. So it restores a huge amount of power to a borough council,” he continued.

The Taskforce’s report and its implementation are sure to be the biggest shake-up in the structure of local government since 2014, and although it is said to be advocating for increased powers to municipal districts, Deputy McGuinness concluded by maintaining that a full restoration of town and city councils would be a return to the best form of governance that Kilkenny City has seen.

“If you look across France or any of the big European countries, you’ll find with powers, the French have a way of bringing democracy to the people instead of moving it away,” he described.

“So I think it would be a far better society with plenty of cohesion and sharing of democracy if that were to happen. It was certainly far better in the past.”