Despite having been written off as a first time candidate he took the third seat in the Ballybrack 6 seater ward (in a field of 13 candidates) in the 1999 Local Elections thanks to an innovative campaign that cost less than £1,000 in total to run.

He established a world first by launching the first Virtual Clinic.

As a County Councillor on Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council he placed 224 Motions and 461 Formal written questions to the Manager and he campaigned for:

Closure of Sellafield: He campaigned for the closure of Sellafield throughout his term, he organised a county wide petition which was sent to BNFL and successfully forced management at BNFL Sellafield to add Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council to the list of parties to be included on all notifications issued by management at Sellafield.

Kilbogget Park: When he started on the council he made the improvement of Kilbogget Park (a former reclaimed dump in the centre of his ward) his top priority through campaigning for funding and keeping it top of the Council's agenda.

Customer Charter: Bin collection in the county was one of the poorest performing services when he was elected. To ensure that constituents got the minimum standard of service they were paying for he successfully successfully implemented Ireland's first customer charter for Refuse Collection Services, the first of its kind in Ireland. As a result written complaints to the Council about the bin service fell from 88 in 2000 to just 2 in 2004.

Affordable Housing: He placed 52 motions during the Development Plan meetings with a focus on providing affordable housing in the County. Motions placed by him successfully secured the designation of Foxrock and Killiney as conservation areas and the commencement of the designation of Killiney Hill as a Special Amenity Area. A motion placed by him also highlighted the lack of public access to the Development Plan meetings(there was public seating for only 12 members of the public for a county of 248,000 people).

To try and ensure that action was taken on what he believed to be serious policy failings by the Dun Laoghaire Fine Gael Council group (in respect of Council party pacts and in respect of the Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Development Plan), he resigned the whip in 2003.

Having successfully achieved his objective he was welcomed back to the Fine Gael council group shortly afterwards. As a result of his initiative Fine Gael National Executive adopted a policy of the vetting by the party leader of all local government pacts in the council elections of 2004.

This led to 3 Fine Gael cathaoirleachs being in position in key high profile Councils around the country within a year of the 2004 Local Elections.

He also wrote frequent letters to the Editor of the Irish Times

During his time on the Council considerable work was featured on his council website.

Due to work commitments he retired from the council at the 2004 Local Elections.