Half an hour after he sat down at his first Labour Party meeting in Clydebank, Patrick McGlinchey walked out to meet his pals at the pub across the street saying it was “intolerable”.

Now, 10 years after he was elected as a councillor and five years as deputy leader of West Dunbartonshire Council, he’s moving on to politics free of being a politician.

At 22 years old, Patrick was one of the youngest elected members in Scotland in the 2007 local authority elections, and readily admits he was a bit naive, even turning up to his first education committee meeting in jeans assuming it would be pretty casual.

He had no family background in politics, no track record of cutting his teeth employed by local politicians, but he saw a gap and put his name forward to represent Clydebank Central.

The man who would become his agent asked first, “Are you a Clydebank man?”

“I was probably a bit of a chancer without really projecting forward,” admits Patrick now, speaking to the Post last week at Clydebank Town Hall as the rain drenched the community outside.

“I didn’t think I would get selected. I thought it would be a community-based role.

“I came in fresh faced, without burdens of being part of the previous [Labour] group. The first group meeting, I came in with six or seven motions and that was not the done thing.”

Patrick’s background was working for Oxfam on issues such as Fair Trade as well as LGBT Youth Scotland and initially joined the Co-operative Party before being led to Labour. He acknowledges that without a political apprenticeship of power structures and other aspects of local government, his naivety and ignorance were an advantage.

“I was just as excited by opposition because it was new to me,” he says.

Looking back, he sees being a councillor as three distinct jobs: amateur social worker, community organiser and politician.

“The case work can be frustrating,” he says. “Eighty per cent is housing and there’s an under capacity for good, decent social housing. We need a housing revolution. I do think it will happen.”

With his time as an elected politician nearly at an end, Patrick freely accepts what doesn’t work in local government, and what his successors need to debate.

“I think there’s a debate to be had about the role of religious representatives on education committees,” he says, “and a question mark around restructuring local government, and whether West Dunbartonshire should exist long term.

“From day one to now, the political climate at a full council meeting is entirely toxic. They are not pleasant experiences. It fills me with anxiety going in there.

“In local government we have more in common than what divides us. Yet we fight. I have never, ever enjoyed that.”

Patrick, now 32, whose dad worked in the shipyards, has spent almost his entire 10 years as a councillor looking at an empty and untouched Queens Quay. That its redevelopment is finally starting is something he’s particularly proud of.

And, having held the regeneration portfolio for the past five years, it’s a subject he’s keen to continue in his next incarnation: student, again.

He was in his last year of university studying politics and theology when he was elected, then gained a masters while working. Now he’s got the chance to do a PhD and focus on the human side of regeneration and how grand projects in Glasgow can benefit Weegies, for example from the Commonwealth Games investments.

Being a councillor while in his 20s might have tied him to the area for longer, says Patrick.

“I might have moved to London for a job,” he says. “And it restricts your political freedom. Tony Benn said he was leaving parliament ‘to spend more time on politics’. I think there’s a political restriction that came with it. But councillors do have a genuine opportunity to help people.”

Since he was elected, there are two new high schools the West College Scotland campus opened, the new leisure centre will open imminently, old school sites are developing new homes and the landscape of the town is changing.

He sees the economic profile changing, but also the tolerance of Clydebank and Scotland more widely. And with that, politics has come alive.

But 10 years is enough, says Patrick, citing the success of Queens Quay and a culture change in education.

“No matter who takes control of the council in May, I would give them my full support driving forward that agenda of bringing in more jobs, raising attainment, and more,” he adds.

“I’m not really a party political animal. I just want there to be success. Even 10 years on, I don’t know if I’m still accepted.”