By Meath Live Reporter Paul Murphy
After a nine-year logjam in the development of a joint statutory Local Area Plan for Drogheda to steer its growth as a “Regional Growth Centre” the county councils in Louth and Meath have agreed to develop a joint Local Area Plan. The news has been welcomed by the Drogheda City Status Group which described the development as “a victory for people power and persistence”.
The group has been campaigning for some years for city status for the Co Louth town which is administered by Louth County Council but has a large hinterland in Co Meath. The move by the council came after the city status group along with other local groups – Development Perspectives and Drogheda Vacancy and Dereliction – were about to launch a High Court bid to get the two councils to fulfil “their statutory duty” to prepare a joint plan for the Boyneside town.
In 2025 the councils had carried out a public consultation on the plan but then pulled back from the idea. The community groups had claimed that the local authorities were in breach of their obligations to properly plan for Drogheda as a single urban area.
The Local Area Plan would create a unified strategy for population growth, housing, infrastructure and regeneration and this would treat Drogheda as a single regional growth centre. The joint plan will cover the future of the town, including its Southern environs, to prevent fragmented growth.
Jimmy Tully once said ‘not an inch’ into Meath
There was a time when any suggested “encroachment” of Drogheda into Meath was fiercely resisted. The late Labour TD for Meath Jimmy Tully declared “not an inch”. However, reality imposed itself when in 1976 Mr Tully, Minister for Local Government, presented the Oireachtas with a proposed piece of legislation with the desperately unwieldy title Local Government Provisional Order Confirmation Bill, 1976, which provided for the extension of the boundary of the borough of Drogheda to take in part of Co Louth and part of Co Meath. The total to be added at that stage was 1,715 acres including some 100 acres of tidal or marsh land. The then Drogheda Corporation had argued that the existing area of the borough – 1,486 acres – was “totally inadequate” to meet development needs.
During a Dail debate Fianna Fail TD Padraig Faulkner described Drogheda as a town of immense importance with charters dating back to 1229 as far as the borough was concerned on the Co Louth side of the Boyne and to 1247 so far as the borough was concerned on the Co Meath side of the Boyne. “The present borough [1976] which straddles the Boyne is held under charters of James I and William III”, he said.
The decision by Louth and Meath County Councils to proceed with coordinated urban plan for Drogheda and its environs was welcomed by Drogheda City Status Group which said that the last local area plan for Drogheda had been adopted in 2011 and expired in 2017. In the years since, it said, thousands of homes had been built across Louth and East Meath while key infrastructure, schools, community facilities, transport links and recreation spaces had “lagged badly behind” leaving what it described as a “planning free for all” in one of Ireland’s fastest-growing urban areas.
The group’s chairperson Anna McKenna said “Our message was simple, wither you plan Drogheda properly as one city or a court will make you”. This u-turn proves that determined local groups can force the system to do its job.”
