A row has broken out at Dublin City Council over a decision to shift the city’s festive light display from December and instead into the new year, with several councillors accusing officials of acting without proper consultation.
Dublin City Council confirmed this week that its long-running “Winter Lights” festival, which has illuminated landmarks along the River Liffey with projections and installations every December since 2018, will now run from mid-January until the St Brigid’s Day bank holiday on 1 February 2027.
Lord Mayor Daryl Barron defended the move on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, insisting that nothing will change in relation to Christmas celebrations in Dublin, with Twinkle Town still going ahead at Christmas time. He argued the timing gap was the real target: people tend to see January as a dreary month for the city, and the council wants to use the period between mid-January and St Brigid’s Day to bring light back to Dublin. Council events staff member Tony Smithers said the move would bring much-needed light, activity and artistry to the city.
Independent councillor Gavin Pepper has been among the most vocal critics of the change, publishing a lengthy statement on social media after fellow councillor Nial Ring raised the issue on the radio.
Pepper argued that the lights have always functioned as a Christmas tradition regardless of their official branding. He pointed out that the council itself introduced the display in 2018 as a Christmas initiative, and noted that as recently as last year, then-Lord Mayor Ray McAdam was still describing the lights as one of the city’s great Christmas traditions. “So let’s stop pretending these lights suddenly have nothing to do with Christmas,” Pepper wrote, adding that he has never called them Winter Lights and doesn’t intend to start now.
He credited councillors Ring and Christy Burke with proposing what he called a “sensible” compromise: keep the lights switched on continuously from Christmas right through to the end of the St Brigid’s Day celebrations, rather than switching them off and relighting them weeks later. Pepper suggested the council’s events team could instead design a separate, standalone programme to mark St Brigid’s Day on its own terms.
Pepper said he would back an emergency motion from Ring and Burke to reverse the decision if one is brought forward, and argued that a change of this kind should have involved proper engagement with elected members. “Give the councillors, and more importantly the people of Dublin they represent, some respect,” he said, summing up his position with a simple line: “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”
This new controversy follows a similar row last November, when a DCC social media post promoting the festival purely as “Dublin Winter Lights,” with no mention of Christmas, drew a heavily critical public reaction and prompted several councillors, including Pepper, to say the council should simply call the display Christmas lights. The council maintained then, as it has since, that the festival has always been branded “Winter Lights” and was never renamed, and that its projections are designed to run through the wider winter season rather than being tied exclusively to Christmas.
That earlier dispute over what to call the lights has fed directly into this week’s row over when they should be switched on, with critics like Pepper arguing the same underlying issue is at play: a council, in their view, drifting away from the festival’s Christmas roots without consulting the elected members whose constituents actually use it.