FAIR CITY?
Dublin city centre was once a thriving, vibrant hub, but now it’s dangerous, dirty and downright depressing, writes Mark Keenan
Near Grafton Street, what looks like a bucket of blood is running from the top to the bottom of the high stone steps leading to the entrance of an elegant Georgian building on St Stephen’s Green. A beggar sitting close by tells us a homeless man has just been stabbed multiple times by two youths who were trying to rob him. An ambulance arrived quickly and he has been taken to hospital.
Were there any gardaí on the scene? He says one arrived, but “ran away”.
Maybe he’s telling the truth, maybe not. He’s out of it. But there are no gardaí to be seen at what could, potentially, at least, be a murder scene.
Dublin city centre is crazy these days, even south of the river.
Disturbed by hearing of the victim’s ordeal and the sight of such an amount of blood, we turn the corner into Grafton Street. And we can’t see it. A cloud of smoke fills the street. In its midst, we can see flames and flashing lights. It’s the fire brigade at work. It’s 8pm on a Friday evening, and retailers have left out neat piles of flattened cardboard boxes in bales for recycling collectors. But some bright spark has decided to set them all alight. Well, at least it’s not another riot.
I had come into the city centre to meet a friend. We had a pint on Baggot Street and thought we might have another off Grafton Street. It’s not going to plan.
We find our way to a popular pub, but the outdoor seating is full. Inside, it’s half empty, so we sit at a table to find it has a “reserved” sign on it. The manager rushes over. We can’t sit there. Nor can we sit at any of the many tables seemingly reserved, but also currently empty on a Friday night. The manager finds us an uncomfortable high stool perch against a side shelf.
Can’t we sit at a table until someone comes along? No. So we leave. At least we’ve saved ourselves the seven quid the pint would have cost. We stay well out of the €10 pint zones.
My friend launches into a rant: “Do you know what? I’m not coming back into the city centre again. I’m completely sick of it. Everywhere you look, it’s people fighting and drinking in the street and threatening people. The constant hassle from beggars.
“Where are the cops? Drug addicts falling around the place and dealing right in front of me. The rip-off pub prices. The shit service. No more.”
And he hasn’t been back.
He doesn’t seem to be the only one. The BBC checked out the Dublin city pub scene earlier this year and reported it had changed beyond recognition, with a lack of pint drinkers and bar owners pushing food hard to get a diminishing number of people in the door.
One pub manager, in a busy corner of town where office-workers are in the thousands, told the Beeb that business has flagged since hybrid working. He said Wednesday is now his busiest day, and even the lunch trade has trailed off.
Coincidentally, I was in his pub some months ago. I placed the same food and drink order twice with the same floor staff member, only to discover (45 minutes later) that the order was never put in. So I left without eating and bought a sandwich on the way back to work.
Like my friend, for the first time in my life I find myself seeking to avoid town if I can. I’m a Dubliner born and bred, and proud of it, but I’ve come to realise that the centre of the city I’m from holds little attraction for me now. These days, I prefer busy suburban centres, like Ranelagh, Rathmines or Stoneybatter. All offer lively pubs and restaurants with good service in a relaxed atmosphere without the grief. And it’s blissfully easy to get home afterwards.
Lots of people now feel nervous about the city centre. Last month, the results of a survey of 1,500 people living and working there showed 90pc believed crime in the city has increased in the last 10 years. Commissioned by a group of Fianna Fail TDs and senators anxious to get more gardaí on the beat, it showed 70pc of people had seen drug dealing or drug use in Dublin, while 65pc had seen anti-social behaviour.
Dublin’s Ana Liffey Drug Project has estimated that crack cocaine use has increased by 594pc from 2017 to 2023, the data backing up reports that it was substituted to addicts by suppliers for heroin during Covid lockdown.
Retailers say shoplifting is getting more aggressive and blatant.
But it’s not all about crime and anti-social behaviour. As a retail destination, the city centre has also lost its way. Take this recent experience: I’m in a well-known fashion retailer late on a
Friday afternoon. The shop is empty on three floors. I’m looking for light woollen knits, but there are no assistants to help. As far as I can tell, they don’t have any (assistants or knits), so I leave empty-handed.
I recently tried to buy a Kindle in a city-centre branch of a leading electrical chain. They had three on display but none for sale — all sold out, they told me. Put my name down and they’ll have it in two weeks, they said.
I’d have gone to Argos, but it closed last year. So I went into a second-hand electrics chain. They have buckets of Kindles. But the three- and four-year-old ones are more expensive than new ones by about 40 quid. It doesn’t make sense. “The price is the price,” I was told. In the end, I went online and bought a new Kindle. It was cheaper, and was delivered the next day. I’m now looking
tno online for knits. If it’s so much easier buy on the internet, what incentive is there to shop in the city centre?
That’s borne out by the number of vacant retail units. There are seven on Grafton Street, Ireland’s premium shopping street, currently advertising for new tenants. In the St Stephen’s Green Centre there are six, and on Henry Street there are at least six, not counting shoe shop Korky’s, which closed in February and is still empty.
John ‘Korky’ Corcoran ran his chain of shops for more than three decades. When he closed his last city centre store this year, he remarked on how the city centre was “hollowed out for retail”.
When he first opened on Henry Street, he did €1.27m of business a year. By last year, that was down to about €300,000.
Like many city-centre shop owners, Korky stopped opening late on Thursdays and began closing earlier to save on shift costs.
Dublin’s city centre was originally designed with retail in mind, he told me.
“Back before the suburban centres opened, the city centre recorded more than half of all the non-motor-related retail activity in the entire country,” he said.
Following the construction of “mega” suburban shopping centres, plus the advent of online retail, retailers are clearly in trouble. Yet Dublin City Council (DCC) still wants the same pound of flesh in commercial rates as it did in the Celtic Tiger era. Corcoran said he was paying €40,000 a year in rates for his Henry Street unit. So what is the council using those rates for?
Well, it’s pushing ahead with plans to make the city centre a cyclist and pedestrian paradise by closing off traffic arteries, pedestrianising more areas and doing away with many car parking spaces. It says it’s embracing a greener,
sustainable future — but as far as retail is concerned, the jury is out as to what effect it will have.
You can cycle or walk if you’re lucky enough to live in the affluent D4 suburbs, but the less wealthy, whose jobs keep the city centre running, don’t actually live within cyclable range, but in Leixlip, Laois, Ashbourne, Clonee and beyond Naas. How are they supposed to access the city centre?
The council obviously hopes they will use public transport. And admittedly, fares have become more affordable in the past two years. But the public transport system remains decades behind that of other European capitals. It takes me an hour to get into the office from just five miles away using public transport, and up to two hours to get home because of erratic bus scheduling.
Bus users complain the service is overcrowded and unreliable. Meanwhile, plans for an underground rail service remain light years away. Taxis are increasingly hard to get, at least on the street, where they drive around empty with their lights on and don’t stop because they’re choosing online jobs from customers using apps.
Parts of the city are now a drug-dealing supermarket. Where dealing is permitted, there is crime
A big talking point in recent weeks has been the closure of several wellknown city restaurants. Last week, Michelin-starred chef Dylan McGrath announced he was closing Brasserie Sixty6 and Rustic Stone. In a social media post, he said they were no longer sustainable, adding: “It’s hard to put into words what has happened to restaurants and the city centre in the last four years.”
That period took in Covid, and then the Government changed the catering sector’s Vat to the regular rate from the long-standing preferential 9pc.
McGrath’s words were echoed by Derry Clarke, who closed his own famed city restaurant, l’Ecrivain, four years ago. Clarke added that Dublin is now “too pricey” for his sector, citing unrealistic rents and overheads.
I’ve certainly noticed that quality restaurants have recently increased their prices quite a bit. At the same time, the variety in their menus seems to have been pared back, the ingredients appear cheaper and plainer and the quality of the food has fallen. So has the service.
The city restaurant sector is in trouble, and you have to feel sorry for them. There are reasons for increased prices and scrimping on menus. Insurance and food costs have soared. They can’t get staff. Add those difficulties to the Vat hike and high commercial rents and you have a perfect storm.
Changing work patterns are also proving challenging for the city centre. The rise in home-working is certainly a big part of why Dublin has lost its commercial rattle and hum. The civil service, arguably the city centre’s biggest employer, is offering contracts citing three days in the office and two at home. Post-Covid, many smaller private businesses that had offices in the city are now entirely working from home. Three-day weeks are common in most city offices, including my own. That’s probably the equivalent of removing 40pc of all city centre footfall overnight — and many fewer coffees, sandwiches, beers, burgers and impulse buys.
Take-up of office space in Dublin dropped to a three-year low between January and March, BNP Paribas said. It estimates that 16,310sqm of space was leased during that three-month period, but 84,000sqm of brand new space was released to the market in the same three months.
Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon was born in Summerhill, Dublin 1, and represents the Dublin Central constituency.
“When Covid came and people stayed home from work, Dublin city centre’s problems were exposed to plain view. Suddenly, you couldn’t avoid them — they were staring at us. And since then you can’t unsee them,” he says.
“Right now, I think the primary problem is that people don’t feel safe. Parts of the city are now an open-air drug-dealing supermarket. They’re doing it with impunity. And where drug dealing is permitted, there is crime and disorder.
“I love Dublin, I really do, and I have sympathy for the gardaí on the beat because there’s not enough of them and they’re not equipped for dealing with it.
“But on a normal working day there’s never a sense that the gardaí present a threat of force to the gangs — aside from when the overtime is applied and more are brought out. We need a municipal-style force.
“The city centre itself looks unloved. Look at Henry Street at night — there’s nothing open and you’d feel unsafe walking down it. O’Connell Street has had empty sites for years.
“If I break a window, it’s vandalism, but it’s also a form of vandalism to buy a building and leave it to rot. We need to apply a ‘use it or lose it’ policy, and if shops are to close, we need to re-use those buildings and get people living in them. To bring back life we need more people living in the city.”
So far, Gannon is cautiously hopeful about the Dublin City Taskforce initiative announced by Taoiseach Simon Harris, which aims to tackle violence and ensure people feel safe in the city centre.
“But you need serious budgets and real resources behind these ideas — budgets that the local authority and gardaí and the traders currently just don’t have,” Gannon said. “We need to allocate proper Government funds to it. It’s our capital city.”
He is convinced that either Dublin needs an elected mayor or the country needs a minister for urban affairs with a portfolio focused on our cities.
“It’s all very well to launch a big initiative with an election coming, but what happens next? The capital city should have an elected minister responsible, because otherwise there’s no one person in charge of it and it becomes just another big initiative that went nowhere.”
There are some bright spots. Business group DublinTown submitted proposals to the Government earlier this year, which included an increased garda presence in the city, a crackdown on youth offenders, more 24-hour transport and safe taxi hubs.
As well as the aforementioned Taskforce, gardaí have launched a recruitment drive for both the main force and the reserve, with plans to triple the number of members of the latter and increase their pay. They are also spending over €2m on a trial run for body cams.
Meanwhile, DCC is itself launching more projects to help pockets within the centre, such as the recent Smart Docklands Initiative that recently issued an open call for pilot projects focusing on a range of areas relating to smart cities: from environmental monitoring, urban greening and biodiversity to anti-social behaviour, safety and community development. As the name says, this is focused on the docklands.
As a Dubliner, it’s hard not to feel sad about what’s happening to my city. When I was a teenager (as my kids are now), the city centre might have been run down, but it was magical.
There was an open lot and the Dandelion Market on the site of St Stephen’s Green Centre. Temple Bar was empty, save for a few second-hand clothes shops and a pizza place. Grafton Street had a smelly fish shop. But we adored it.
The Dead Zoo had all four of its floors open, instead of just one (now about to close again for many years to put in lifts to the floors that are closed). Watch The Commitments again. The city centre was rocking.
Even now it seems not so long ago that it was at its best. Lively, engaging and a pleasure to venture in to. And it could be that way again. The city centre is at a crossroads. It desperately needs a great big new vision and direction — not denial — that can only be put together by a collective of so many vested agencies.
When that big idea is formed, it needs concerted action to achieve the turnaround. It needs to be driven in unison by the gardaí, the Government, the traders, DCC and the public transport services.
In short, Dublin city centre needs buckets of creative bloody-mindedness. Can it be a fair city once again?