How NI’s Super Councils Learned to Be Accountable to Nobody…

Council Watch is a group of concerned locals holding Newry, Mourne & Down District Council accountable

When Newry, Mourne and Down District Council’s proposed gondola up Slieve Donard collapsed, you might have expected some form of reckoning. A project tied to £30 million of Belfast Region City Deal money was redirected from Thomas’s Quarry to Kilbroney Forest Park, where it also ran into serious difficulties, and then approved by the BRCD Executive Board before the landowner’s permission had been obtained.

The entire purpose of a business case process is to determine whether something should proceed. Approving the concept first and gathering the evidence later is an inversion of proper governance. It’s like applying for planning permission after you’ve built the house, or ordering the post-mortem before the patient has been admitted.

But this story is about more than a gondola project that didn’t happen – it’s about what happens to £30 million of public money when there is no accountability in the system. What’s happening at NMDDC right now – a High Court challenge, a district-wide petition, and questions that keep not getting answered – raises issues that should concern anyone living under any of NI’s eleven super councils, not just those in the shadow of the Mournes.

The human cost

In November 2023, Newry and Downpatrick flooded. Over fifty business premises were affected in Downpatrick alone.

The council was handed £10 million to distribute to devastated local businesses. It administered the scheme so poorly that more than half went back to Stormont unspent. Only £3.8 million was actually paid out to claimants. Flood victims borrowed money from friends to repair their businesses. Some were told they didn’t qualify. Others were approved, paid… and then ordered to hand the money back. One business owner who was told her grant had been made “in error” said she was ready to take the council to court. SDLP councillors described the outcome as “unthinkable and impossible to justify.”

When challenged, the council pointed to DfI as the lead emergency agency, as though that settled the matter. But the council ran the business support scheme, wrote the criteria, took the applications – and returned £5 million to Stormont unspent.

A “Citizens’ Revolt”

A couple of weeks ago, the community group Council Watch launched a district-wide petition and open letter demanding votes of no confidence in Chief Executive Marie Ward (one of the highest paid public servants in NI) and Director of Economy, Regeneration and Tourism Conor Mallon . The petition was backed by a coalition of ten community organisations stretching the length of the district, from Newry to Downpatrick. News of this “citizens’ revolt” has even reached the pages of Private Eye’s “Rotten Boroughs”, which focuses on particularly egregious examples of corruption and incompetence in local government.

The group’s concerns span several areas, but the Civic Hub planning allegations are the most documented and the most difficult to dismiss. Planning expert Andy Stephens has alleged four separate breaches of mandatory planning law in NMDDC’s handling of its own application – including the application being presented to the Planning Committee on three separate occasions without fulfilling statutory notification and advertising requirements.

Not once. Three times.

There is something almost admirably brazen about a council applying to its own planning committee for permission for its own building, allegedly failing the same statutory requirements it expects of every other applicant in the district, being told by a qualified external expert that something is wrong, dismissing that expert, and then – when the matter refuses to go away – stating it is “satisfied that the planning application has been progressed in accordance with statutory requirements.”

Geoff Ingram of Council Watch put it plainly: “These breaches reflect the same pattern of systemic maladministration that we have seen in major council projects across the entire district. No other applicant in this council area has had such ‘red carpet’ treatment. This is a case of one rule for the council and one rule for other applicants.”

The paper trail that isn’t there

According to opponents, the Civic Hub planning application bears a litany of transparency failures: documents that should be on the public planning file were withheld; the community consultation report was submitted three months late; FOI deadlines were missed.

With regard to FOI non-compliance, it is worth noting that a former chief executive of East Antrim Borough Council is currently before Ballymena Magistrates Court charged with offences including altering a record with intent to prevent its lawful disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. The case is at an early stage, the charges are denied, and an abuse of process argument on grounds of delay is expected to be heard in April.

The East Antrim Borough Council case is a useful reminder that failures to comply with FOI laws can result in criminal charges.

Civic Hub heading to court

In November 2025, local resident Paul Lennon issued judicial review proceedings against NMDDC’s decision to grant planning permission for the Civic Hub. The hearing is understood to be listed at the High Court in Belfast for March 2026. His solicitor has described the grounds as “strong and multifaceted”, citing failures around consultation, transparency, environmental considerations, and the correct application of planning law.

Lennon’s own statement cuts to the point: “This is not just a planning issue. It is a question of financial prudence, community voice, and accountability; and the burden now falls on an ordinary resident like me to ensure that this decision is scrutinised.”

The financial context matters here. The Civic Hub project has grown from an initial reported cost of £10.5 million to a current estimate of between £30 and £35 million. NMDDC already carries what is reportedly the highest debt of any council in Northern Ireland – over £68 million.

Why this matters beyond Newry

NMDDC would be easier to dismiss as an unfortunate anomaly if the patterns it displays were not so familiar.

While NMDDC and its beleaguered leadership may have been identified by some in the press as an extreme example of administrative failure – a “laughing stock” as one councillor memorably put it – the systemic issues may be wider and deeper than many are prepared to acknowledge.

RHI is the obvious comparator – although the scale is different, the patterns of dysfunction are identical. A governance process existed on paper; proper sequencing was inverted or ignored; people who raised concerns were told they were wrong; the institution closed ranks; the public found out late and incompletely. Unfortunately RHI is not unique – last year’s Audit Office report highlighted systemic issues with capital project delivery in Northern Ireland, particularly around cost overruns, delays, weak oversight, and poor accountability.

The City Deal angle is particularly important because it connects NMDDC directly to Stormont and beyond. Belfast Region City Deal – money flows through a multi-agency partnership involving councils, departments and central government, all of which have nominal oversight responsibilities. If a council is approving concept proposals ahead of business cases, that should be triggering red flags at programme board level.

NI has a consistent and depressing pattern — visible in RHI, Lough Neagh, NI Water — of oversight bodies that either don’t catch problems, or do and stay quiet.

The planning self-regulation problem is also specifically NI-flavoured. The 2015 super council reform transferred significant planning powers to councils that simultaneously hold major development interests of their own. This tension was noted at the time. NMDDC’s Civic Hub application – the council as its own planning applicant, apparently receiving treatment no private citizen could expect, is the perfect example of this conflict. The fact that it has now produced a High Court challenge on a project that has more than doubled in estimated cost is an illustration of how that structural problem is becoming a direct financial liability for ratepayers.

And then there is the culture of secrecy. NMDDC has routinely used exemptions under the Local Government Act 2014 to move sensitive agenda items away from press and public scrutiny. Again, this is not unique to NMDDC. It is a structural feature of NI local government that makes meaningful external oversight close to impossible and that has allowed the gap between what councillors are told and what is actually happening to widen, in some cases, well past the point of functioning democracy.

The 2027 question

NI’s council elections fall in May 2027. That is fourteen months away. Every councillor currently sitting on NMDDC will have to decide, in the coming weeks, how they want to be remembered when those elections arrive.

One interesting point about Council Watch’s open letter is that it was not addressed to management. It was addressed to elected councillors – because that is where democratic accountability is supposed to reside. The question it puts is not complicated: do you stand with the people who elected you, or with the administration you are supposed to be scrutinising?

That question has a way of becoming easier to answer when a High Court hearing is weeks away, a petition is gathering signatures, ten community organisations have put their names to a public letter, and council elections are closing in.

The super councils created in 2015 were supposed to represent better, more strategic, more accountable local government than the patchwork they replaced. A decade on, the increasingly precarious “high-wire act” at NMDDC is a test of whether that promise was ever real – or whether it was always just a more expensive version of the same closed shop.