Galway City Council
The city has had its own government since a charter of Richard II in 1395, and Peirce Lynch was its first mayor. Today that government is Galway City Council, 18 members meeting at City Hall on College Road under a mayor, with the administration run by a chief executive, Leonard Cleary. Housing, roads, planning, parks, culture and the environment inside the city boundary are its business; everything outside it belongs to the county council.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
Eoin Gardiner, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Galway City Hall, Galway County Council, Eyre Square on the 3D model; tap a pin for its page and directions.
Corporation, commissioners, council
The old corporation was dissolved under the Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840 and replaced by town commissioners set up by a local act of 1836; the Galway Town Improvement Act of 1853 appointed 24 of them. Under the 1898 act the county of the town became an urban district in 1899, it was made a borough in 1937, a county borough in 1985 and a city council under the Local Government Act 2001.
How it is elected
Councillors serve five-year terms and are elected by proportional representation with the single transferable vote from three local electoral areas, whose electoral divisions were defined as wards in 1986; the current members were elected on 7 June 2024. The council sends two representatives to the Northern and Western Regional Assembly, where they sit on the West Strategic Planning Area Committee. City Hall is pinned on the model with the county's Áras an Chontae a few streets away on Prospect Hill.
Questions people ask
Where is Galway City Hall?
How many councillors does Galway City Council have?
Who was the first mayor of Galway?
Written from Wikipedia, "Galway City Council" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.