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Dundalk Leader 12th August 2026
Rachel Finegan- Healthy Louth Co-ordinator By Paul Byrne THE Healthy Cities & Counties Programme is a Department of Health funded initiative located within local government with a focus on life-long wellbeing, prevention of illness; enabling wellbeing environments and the reduction of health inequities. More specifically, the programme highlights the important role and responsibility that local government has in enhancing community wellbeing outcomes. The programme has a formal governance arrangement within the LCDC structure which gives it a strong platform from which to build collaborative effort and support high level goal efforts within Local Economic and Community Plans. The Healthy Ireland Coordinator is responsible for the delivery of the programme. A Healthy Ireland Fund secured from the Department of Health is provided to each Local Authority to help leverage activity in specific outcome areas. The fund is used to lever support for projects in specific outcome areas and its management and administration forms part of the overall work programme of the Coordinator. The primary work of the Healthy Ireland Coordinator is a collaborative and networking role to encourage implementation of key wellbeing determinant objectives within local government, explore resource and partnership opportunity locally, regionally and nationally to influence resource allocation flows to the Local Authority for wellbeing outcome focused projects, and seek out opportunity from a European perspective considering the WHO European Healthy Cities Network approach and relevant EU programme activity. Locally, the Healthy Louth Coordinator is Ardee native Rachel Finegan and recently the Dundalk Leader sat down for a chat to find out a bit more about what her role entails. I’m in the council since 2017 and I was here up
Rachel Finegan. until 2024 in various sections. I was predominantly in housing and I worked in capital delivery, infrastructure, procurement and lots of different sections. I then moved to Meath County Council for a little while as their Economic Development Officer and then I came back in February to Louth County Council when I started this role as Healthy Louth Coordinator. I’m from Ardee originally so it was nice to come back to work in Co. Louth. I actually didn’t realise how much motivation wise, how nice it is to work in your own County. I’d actually taken it for granted when I worked here before. And then when I moved away I was like ‘Oh God it’s nice when you are delivering projects that they are benefitting your own neighbourhoods’ HOW LONG HAS LOUTH HAD A HEALTHY LOUTH CO-ORDINATOR? “It’s on the go since 2016 when the Healthy Ireland Fund came into effect. Nationally there’s a spend of about €30m to date on Healthy Ireland. We are in Round 4 at the moment. We have a National Network which consists one Health Coordinator for every local authority. So there are 31 Local Authorities across the country. And then there is also Sláintecare
local development officers. Louth this year got two of those as well so there had been 19 Sláintecare areas in Ireland and now it’s increased to 24 so it’s brilliant for us that we have two of those, one for Dundalk and one for Drogheda. “Previously a lot of the Healthy Ireland Projects and funds would have been taking up by Dundalk and Drogheda because there’s such large areas of deprivation and the focus is promoting mental health and physical activity across the county. Now that we’ve got both a Healthy Louth Co-ordinator and two Sláintecare Development Officers I’m hoping we can spread our wings a bit and start focusing on rural areas as well as our two major towns. So the three of us will be working together and we each have a budget of €75,000 so it’s fantastic for the county that we now have three pots to dip into and the plan is for us all to collaborate on different projects and work together. WHEN DID THE GOVERNMENT START FOCUSSING ON TRYING TO KEEP THE COUNTRY HEALTHY? “It’s definitely a focus area now more than ever. To be fair there has been work done in previous years but it probably didn’t get the publicity it deserved. When I was
working in Louth years ago in the council I suppose Healthy Ireland wouldn’t have really been on my agenda in terms of my day to day work. Now, that the role is permanent and is more strategic I will be linking in with public realms such as our housing teams, operations teams and we will be hoping to actually collaborate across all the directorates and put it on the agenda for all of our planning items. EXAMPLES OF PROGRAMMES DELIVERED. “We would have a bit of crossover already with different sections of Louth County Council including Louth Local Sports Partnership. Boxing Clever for example was rolled out between 2023 and 2025 in the Red Door. That was a fantastic programme that ran for 20 weeks and was an integrated educational, fitness, and substance use recovery initiative run at The Red Door Project in Drogheda. It was supported by Louth County Council and Healthy Louth via the Healthy Ireland Fund, it combined physical boxing training with QQI-accredited education and was a huge success. “We also funded ‘Sailing Into Wellness’ which was delivered by Turas counselling here in the town. That was a four week programme for people with addictions who went into the ocean on a boat and they are learning how to sail, how to built teamwork and peer leadership. And the way it worked was that they would return the next year as a leader and they’d be helping the following year’s people in the programme. “We also do a programme that is rolled out by Dundalk Youth Centre but it is targeted at youths across the whole county. So, I don’t know, maybe 50 0r 60 of them will get on a bus and they would go away off to Warrenpoint for a week for teambuilding and leadership. It’s physical activity, mental health programmes and that has been build-
ing each year and it is really beneficial. COMMUNITY COLLABORATION “We have a tool that we use which is called the Place Standard Tool and that is a framework used to evaluate and improve the physical and social quality of a place. That is where you bring the community in for a structural conversation about the place where they live. Basically you do a walkaround of the community/ area in question with a mix of residents, council staff and decision makers. You do a walkaround and there are 14 different themes such as community safety, public lighting, cracks on the road, green spaces, transport into town etc. “Everyone comes back and they can mark their local area on a personal level and then we do a workshop where we break into groups and we have a discussion about what was just seen on the walkabout. It’s all supposed to promote that community informed decision making for policy in the council. And then we know that we’ve actually done our week in consulting with the community before rolling out different services or just not presuming that we know what is needed in those areas and that the community get to meet with the council and have an input,” explains Rachel. PROMOTING HEALTH TO YOUNG PEOPLE IN LOUTH Recently we reached out to the ETB and potentially with the schools we will be looking to roll out a campaign to teach the pupils healthy habits. It’s a bit tricky as I don’t have a team so I do find that a wee bit challenging as you are just one person and it’s hard to commit to something like that. But definitely the young demographic is a of huge importance. We need to target kids at a young age and kind of nurtured and guided. We do fund initiatives but in my five months in here so far there’s been no direct correspondence with youth groups.
HELPING ELDERLY IN LOUTH “I would be working closely with Sinead McVerry from the Age Friendly department here in Louth County Council and we would be going to a lot of the same events and I would be promoting stuff like healthy eating and we would have documentation and leaflets on bereavement and chronic illness and end of life and all the health events that we would go to they compliment each other very nicely. It’s good that we can crossover and share the workload a little bit. The Intergenerational piece is something that we are both interested in progressing because it’s just such a lovely dynamic to have the young people and the old people and that sense of it takes a village to create a community so we are bursting with ideas. HOPES FOR EXPANSION OF ROLE “For all of the things that we are looking to do I suppose the €75,000 pot doesn’t go far enough and we have to look for external funding to help us. Health and wellbeing is such a massive remit and we are making a case at a national level for more staff. I do find it a little bit limiting in terms of what you can deliver. You are relying on partners which we are grateful for as they are phenomenal but if we can help secure any additional funding which helps the objectives of Healthy Louth it’s brilliant. ENTHUSIASM FOR ROLE “I’m loving the job and I didn’t really know what to expect coming in. I knew the Round 4 funding had got a one year extension and I was thinking we just have to see out those projects a couple of which I moved over to SláinteCare to free up funds and ease pressure. There is a great wee team here and we have a good wide scope of different people. It has been amazing so far and I can’t give Louth County Council enough credit for how supportive they have been.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme
“I’m getting invited into meetings already. I’m only a couple of months in and somethings it can take a bit longer to kind of find your feet and I thought I’d have to be knocking on the door and just rocking up to the meetings inviting myself,” laughs Rachel. “It’s been great and everybody has been supportive and got on board with the whole health and wellbeing message. It does kind of feel that all the decision making is all local authority apart from the hospitals so I do think we play an important role in how our community functions. MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLBEING “When we talk about mental health we talk about your mood, stress and anxieties and there are so many things that can feed into that. Like there is a huge link with housing for us. The Council are the biggest landlord in the County so there’s a huge piece there. “There is a new tenants forum so Healthy Louth and Sláintecare will definitely be committing to helping the housing section with that in any way that we can. We need to hear the feedback from the tenants and how we can improve things. It’s a great chance for us to access the opinions of over 5000 people both rural and urban around the county. All the positions that the local authorities are responsible for can affect people’s health and wellbeing so it’s just good that we are conscious of that and we have it on the agenda. “There is a group called Sanctuary Runners and we went along with them to the Parkrun in Dundalk. It was their first time. It kicked off and it was very successful and it was just brilliant. A lovely community atmosphere and it was such a good vibe. It focuses on migrants and integration and it’s very refreshing to see the reception they got because sometimes it doesn’t feel like that when you’re reading the news. So we will be keeping in touch with them to see how we can keep the momentum going for them.