Michael Pidgeon

speaker

145 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 22 Jun

Michael Pidgeon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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The Claire Byrne Show · Irish cities may soon be able to introduce a tourism tax · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

Local councils, by law, have to have balanced budgets every year.

It's actually a problem.

I think they should be able to borrow a bit more than they currently do.

But by law, we have to have a balanced budget.

And if we don't pass it, the minister actually dissolves the entire council.

I lose my job.

It's a terrible system.

But there's no hole in the budget.

This is about extra spending that we'd like to do.

And if you have some ambition or interest in the city, you should be thinking of lots of ways to do it.

I named a couple of specific examples.

He's right that I don't have...

a plan of projects that are ready to go, because at this stage, we're still just asking government to give us the ability to set any sort of charge.

Once we get there, I'm more than happy to work with hotels and the tourist sector to figure out ways that we'd like to spend it.

For me, street cleaning is an obvious thing because, you know, I see a lot of tourists in Dublin.

It's very visible that there's waste on the street, even though we are trying to do better on street cleaning.

It seems very obvious that that's an initial target.

But if you've got other ideas, I'm always open to them.

But fundamentally for me, I don't want to start saying, oh, we're going to clean up Dublin, we're going to fix Dublin if I don't have any extra resources to do that.

Because it's just it's just not a meaningful promise if you don't have the resources behind the pledges.

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