To help you make an informed choice at the polling station on November 29th, 92.5 Phoenix FM will be speaking to many of the candidates from Dublin West to hear what their priorities are for the next Dáil. This series is adapted from our ‘General Election 2024’ podcast series as broadcasted on D15 Today, where you will find full-length interviews with the candidates.
Cllr Tania Doyle is making her first bid for the Dáil in the hope of becoming Dublin West’s first independent TD. At the June local elections, she far exceeded the quota for re-election in Ongar so she will be hoping this success translates to the wider constituency. “I can’t speak for other independents, I can only speak for myself. But […] I am an independent that has run through local elections, that has experience. I’m an independent that topped the last local elections and came in at the second seat in 2019. I think people want experience.”
We have highlighted some of the main points raised in the interview.
On being an independent
Cllr Doyle was first co-opted to the council in July 2015 to replace Cllr Annette Hughes, who resigned for health reasons. She was a member of the Anti-Austerity Alliance party, which later became Solidarity, as was fellow Mulhuddart councillor Ruth Coppinger. However, Cllr Doyle sought re-election in 2019 and this year as an independent. Cllr Doyle says her own involvement with the Anti-Austerity Alliance was as a sort of cross-party solidarity movement against water charges. “I started off [in] a union background […] and I would have got involved way before. […] Actually, my first campaign was the WPDF, the Wives and Partners of the Defence Forces, because my husband is Defence Forces, so I would have been very, very young when I started off there. And then I got very heavily involved around the end of the bin charges and into the water charges and was part of the Anti-Austerity Alliance, which was a group of like-minded people of all parties that got together and were trying to, I suppose, represent the community when austerity measures were imposed on communities.”
Independents are finding a new wave of popularity amid disenchantment with the major political parties both in government and in opposition, with as much as 20% of the electorate intending to give their first-preference vote to an independent candidate. Cllr Doyle points out that she remains the only independent councillor elected in Dublin 15; across Fingal, independents won over 16% of first-preference votes in June. “I don’t toe the party political line, I’m not with a party, I stand on my own two feet, my mistakes are my mistakes, and I work on behalf of the community.”
Fellow independent candidate Natalie Treacy suggested when speaking to us that local issues are more important to voters than national issues, at least here in Dublin 15. Where does Cllr Doyle stand on the problems facing the electorate across the country? “I look at what I am dealing with, and I have been dealing with since I went into office in 2019, and I am basically working as a TD. You know, I work representing for groups, additional needs, support services, housing. […] Any issues that are directly affected, affecting the community, that’s what I deal with. So I mean, I don’t legislate, I am local government. So until you get into Leinster House, that’s when you are a legislator.”
On housing
Cllr Doyle has long been an advocate for the devolvement of more powers to local governments, and that is something that extends to her approach to housing. “A first on my list would be to bring the powers back to the local authority, and have the local authority build their own housing at a faster pace and bigger numbers, because the powers were pulled back from the local authority and it’s just simply not working. If we look back, I come from a council house in a council estate, I come from Cabra, and I’m 24 years here in Blanchardstown. We look back on the likes of Cabra, Marino, Finglas: fast housing projects when the country was basically on its knees. We are a country now that is quite wealthy, as we’ve been told. […] We need to go back to the local authority and building programs financed by government to build on council lands and take back the powers themselves. I’m a true believer that when we start going in the direction of privatisation, we lose our hold on what we should be doing as a government and a local authority to build houses.”
Some of the solutions to alleviate the housing crisis have long been known to the council and the government, Cllr Doyle says, but neither party has acted on them. “As an elected representative, we have been looking at this issue. I remember back in pre-local elections in 2019, going down to the North Strand in and around that direction, when we were being shown modular homes for instance, with Fr Peter McVerry at the time. These modular homes were roughly about €95,000. It was a very good opportunity at the time for government to buy these modular homes at a very, very reasonable price and put those modular homes with the services on public land that we have, and we had. But they never did, it never came about. Fast forward 10 years later, where I’m still in office and these modular homes have gone up to treble the price. Treble, if not more. My point is, they’ve had plenty of time to sort out the situation. They’ve had plenty of time and it’s actually gotten worse.”
Cllr Doyle is looking for more community-led housing initiatives and says this would be a red line for her in any government negotiations: “We need proper, sustainbale development and proper planning as well.”
On health
Cllr Doyle echoes a number of other Dublin West candidates in believing that it is the likes of booking a GP appointment – or even finding a GP with spaces available – and years-long waiting lists that are the main issues facing the health service. “When you get into the health system, it seems to work but it’s getting into the health system [that is the problem], isn’t it? But it covers an awful lot. I mean, I would do a lot of work at the moment, and I have for a number of years as a strong campaigner for children with additional needs. Again, we’re in crisis with the services there.”
“When we have government allowing our talents, our nurses that are training here, leave this country, go off to Dubai, go off to America to work elsewhere, that stems back now to the housing crisis because they cannot afford to live in the area that they are working in, as in rent or buy, and then also you have the cost-of-living as well. So that’s affecting everybody.”
Cllr Doyle notices a trend of underresourcing and underfunding across the board. “The resources are not there. […] They’re not in schools. There’s no school places. There’s no resources for children with additional needs. There’s no resources for children that need speech and language, occupational therapy, physiotherapy. The hospitals are telling me the resources are not there in the hospitals […] and we don’t have the resources in the Garda Síochána either.”
When asked about the common criticism that too much money is being funnelled into administration rather than frontline health workers, Cllr Doyle says that “of course” spending needs to be “refocus[ed]”. “I think we need to go back into communities again. I’m very community-based, as you know. Previously, when you used to have the old health boards, and the health boards used to be based, the clinics were based in communities, I think we need to go back to that.” Primary care centres are trying their best but “they’re not resourced, they’re struggling. They’re bulging at the seams. So again, it does come back to supports and funding.”
On childcare
All major parties in goverment and in opposition are setting out their policies for childcare if elected, including Fine Gael’s commitment that parents would spend no more than €200 a month per child if returned to government. In 2012, former Labour leader and Dublin West TD Joan Burton stated while in the coalition government with Fine Gael that the lone parent payment would not be cut unless “a system of safe, affordable and accessible childcare [was] in place, similar to what is found in the Scandinavian countries whose system of social protection we aspire to.” Three years later as Tánaiste, she backtracked on that promise, and the aspirations of a Scandinavian model for childcare remain exactly that over a decade on. Does Cllr Doyle believe Fine Gael has the will to follow through this time around?
“Well, I am listening to this for a long, long time. I listened to this when – no disrespect to Joan Burton – but I remember Joan Burton saying, “we need the model like the Scandinavian model”. […] Only recently, we had a childcare facility close down in one of our community centers because they couldn’t compete with the private childcare system. So we need public and affordable child care. Again, where do we start? We need to start giving more support services to the public childcare system, and the existing childcare system that’s in our communities at the moment.”
Cllr Doyle wants a public childcare system with more state involvement. “If you look at the model, which I have looked at for many, many years in the likes of [the Netherlands] and Germany [and] across Europe, you have a childcare system that parents can walk to where they need to drop their children off to. [We have] the services in our communities and in our schools.”
You can listen to our full interview with Cllr Doyle on our ‘General Election 2024’ podcast series.
