Limerick Mayor John Moran: From Wall Street to Merchant’s Quay
John Moran, a former Wall Street lawyer, investment banker, and former Secretary General of the Department of Finance, made history in June 2024 by becoming the first directly elected mayor in Ireland, assuming office in Limerick as an independent.
The effectiveness of Moran’s administration will likely determine whether executive-style mayorships are the best way to govern Ireland’s cities.
Potentially positive signs can be taken from the turnout in the mayoral election, which stood at 51.8 per cent. Although this is low compared to a general election or even local election turnout, this level of engagement is significantly higher than the average mayoral election turnout in Britain or the United States.
For comparison, in the 2024 London Mayor election, Sadiq Khan won in an election where the turnout was 40.1 per cent, and mayoral elections in New York City average a turnout of 26.5 per cent.
Moran, 58, has pursued a diverse and interesting career which has taken him from Ireland to France, Australia, and the United States.
Having worked in law on New York’s Wall Street in the late 1980s and early 1990s following his graduation from the prestigious American Ivy League Wharton School in Pennsylvania (the alumni of which includes X CEO Elon Musk and former US President Donald Trump), Moran first returned to Ireland in 1990 and became associate of the Institute of Taxation of Ireland while continuing to work and travel globally.
After three years leading a New York law firm, Moran then spent 10 years working for Zurich Financial Services, where he established and led Zurich Bank in Dublin before being promoted to oversee the company’s Asian operations from Sydney and later the multi-billion dollar global ZCM operations in New York.
In 2012, Moran entered the public sector, after he was appointed by former Minister for Finance Michael Noonan as Secretary General of the Department of Finance, a time period which was characterised by government negotiations with the ‘Troika’ over bailouts, as well as the sales of the Bank of Ireland and Irish Life in the aftermath of the banking crisis.
Moran has never been a member of a political party, although, significantly, he campaigned with Leo Varadkar TD during
the referendum to establish a mayor of Limerick.
Entering a crowded field of candidates as an independent in the June 2024 election, Moran topped the poll on 23 per cent of first preference votes, and 35.7 per cent on the final count in an election where the three main parties evidently (as they cumulatively polled 38 per cent of first-preference votes) failed to capture the imagination of the electorate.
Elected on a vague campaign of doing “more for Limerick”, Moran pledged that he was “passionate about Limerick and making it much better than it is”, and to be a mayor who has “an ambitious but realistic vision for Limerick”.
This is a theme he has maintained in his recently-published draft mayoral programme where he has pledged a “more healthy”, “more prosperous”, and “more liveable Limerick”.
Moran was inaugurated on 21 June 2024 and will serve a five-year term and will have no limit on the number of times he can seek re-election.
