‘Everything we do as a local authority should impact people and how you’re living in your environment’

After 10 years at the helm of Meath Co Council, Chief Executive, Jackie Maguire has called time on a dynamic 42-year career. The Dunderry woman worked her way up through the ranks to become one of the country’s first female chief executives, moving from Meath’s Head of Finance to the top position in Leitrim Co Council in 2006. She served a full seven years before returning home to Co Meath. Ahead of her departure Jackie tells GAVAN BECTON it has been a “privilege” to have held the position of CE for the last 10 years 

GAVAN BECTON: So how does it feel to have 10 years done and dusted with Meath Co Council and to be retiring?

JACKIE MAGUIRE: Well, in one way, it feels a great achievement to have had the position for the last 10 years, especially in your own home county. You can influence and you can change things. So from that perspective, it has been a great opportunity. It's probably right to hang up the boots and hand over to newer, more innovative ideas that come along. But at the moment, I think I just feel like I'm off on a long holiday. I'm sure it will dawn on me at some stage.

GB: When you started out in public service was becoming county manager or chief executive your ambition?

JM: No, no, no. Things were a lot different back then. I'm 42 years in the service. It was 1981 when I started and everything was very different. I started as a clerical officer coming straight from school. Well, actually the entry grade was clerical typist but that got eliminated after a time which was only right.

I suppose I never really saw myself as a chief executive or going that high up. It was all competition and back then, you had to learn the legislation, which was fine. So I just took each grade as it came, step by step and always when I got one grade up I'd say 'well, that's me finished'. But I always felt I kind of worked myself out of the role if you know what I mean. When you get into it, you're not 100 per cent sure then you're excited about it. And then after five or six years, you realise 'I've done this now I can do the next one'. That's really the way I approached it.

GB: Was there ever an issue with glass ceilings as you rose through the ranks.

JM: I never found it a major issue, but it was always there I suppose at the very earliest stages, it just wasn't spoken about, but you kind of just knew.

I suppose it was predominantly males and you predominantly worked in the male environment. I suppose I would have really noticed when I went into the role of head of finance, that would have been the first 'senior, senior', role, and they were all male.

GB: What was it like returning home after seven years in Leitrim? What had changed?

JM: It was great in one sense, but probably a little bit daunting. It's just the scale of everything. All the same things happen in any local authority just at a different scale and a different pace, which I think is actually quite good because it gives you a bit of grounding and it gives you time to learn the job at a slower pace whereas in Meath you're galloping, no point saying otherwise, you're galloping.

The environment had changed too. April 2013 saw the demise of town councils and the introduction of six municipal districts and changing from 29 councillors to 40.

That was one of the biggest changes and you have to kind of manage through that and part of the difficulty we would have had would have been our financial base at the time. It was quite poor. Our own resources available to us were limited. And if you remember, in 2013 we were really coming out of the economic crisis. Huge staff members had been cut in local government, funding had been cut to local government.

So in fairness, it was the introduction of local property tax, which I know people don't like, that gave Meath additional funding. And then what we set about trying to do was grow our economic base and develop our economic strategy.

We were huge outward bound community, so we thought, well, if you could address a little bit of that and get a small percentage of those [people] back, working in Meath that's what we would try to do. If you created additional employment locally, you went a long way to creating your sustainable communities, giving people a better quality of life.

GB: Is housing a constant source of frustration or is it something that we've done better than others?

JM: Buying land is a huge issue. Previously you'd always buy land well in advance, like I'm talking five to seven years in advance, so that you could have that planned out and ready to go. But that all stopped during the economic crisis. So therefore, you haven't got that stock of land built up in your land bank. Trying to address that now is a challenge.

We prefer to buy land by agreement, because it's the easier option unlike CPO [compulsory purchase order] which works, but it's a very long drawn out process, and they can be quite complicated on the legal end.

What gets on everybody's nerves including mine is vacant properties. It's an awful eyesore on the environment and for people living around it. It really is a difficult challenge to understand and get your head around it.

We have always delivered above our targets over the last five, six years and we will hopefully continue to do that. We don't build, or the council doesn't build houses. We're dependent on builders, contractors, construction sector, just as much as all the developers are. We don't have bricklayers and so on and so forth.

To build our own social housing, we need land and then it is a partnership because you do have to create your sustainable communities. You don't want to repeat the mistakes of 20/30 years ago and create just massive ranges of social housing and nothing else because like that, you have to put in your community facilities, your playgrounds, footpaths all of that connectivity. So from that perspective, you have to do a collaborative approach with other big housing agencies and developers. So we've made real progress on that.

GB: Should we be building our own houses, that's what used to happen?

JM: If you look back on numbers we never did build huge numbers of homes every year back then. It's logical when you think about it in 2007/8/9 and because of the economic downturn, there was a huge over supply of housing, and unfinished estates and so on. So nothing happened for a period of time. And if you were to keep up with a modest population growth we should have been building between 20-25,000 houses per year just to keep pace with that modest growth. And that didn't happen. So now there's a period of time where we're just going to have to play catch up, and it's difficult for particularly younger people who are trying to get on the housing ladder to purchase their own home.

We're seeing huge numbers and I see it with friends, my own children, they're not going to be able to afford mortgages where our generation could. Affordability is a major issue.

GB: Most difficult moments?

JM: Well, one of the more difficult ones was the demise of our three town councils and the introduction of six municipal districts and we're the only county that has six municipal districts.

And then going from 29 councillors to 40 members in six MDs - but there was an imbalance there. We had the traditional growth centres of Navan, Trim, Kells coming out of the 70s, 80s, 90s and then you had the newer centres like Ashbourne and Laytown and there was a major infrastructure deficits there.

Also, I know it's torture for the businesses now at the moment but when the Navan 2030 project is finished, the whole centre of Navan should be able to revitalise itself and be, you know, a really buzzed up place.

GB: What about the cyber hack in 2016 when over €4.3m was fraudulently taken from the council bank account?

JM: Nightmare stuff. We were very lucky there. Our processes and systems spotted it and caught it. I was able to make contact with Gardai at senior level who were able to contact the relevant authorities and stop it which was the main thing. When you look at the fact that as a local authority we do our business in a very public arena, those that are in that cyber crime world can take all the pieces and they exploit it and use that to attempt to attack and fool you. It was frightening. It was unbelievable, but I suppose it's like any crisis that you're in, you know, your plan and your processes kick in. And you just keep doing this until you solve the problem.

GB: Highlights of your tenure

JM: Everything we do as a local authority should impact people and how you're living in your environment. And when you see that slowly change in different places, that's very rewarding. And on the other side of things, you know, eliminating our deficit that was there in revenue and building up funding through strong financial management was important.

And then I suppose I'd have to say our new headquarters [Buvinda House] was massive because the space that we were in, or should I spaces because we're in at least five of them, was not conducive to good work performance.

Ultimately, it's nice to be able to look around and say, you helped change that or you had a part to play in improving someone's environment. I'm really happy to have played a role in that.