This week a hoax suspect device was planted outside a community hall in Dublin's south inner city as residents met to discuss drug-dealing in the area. Local people say they are at tipping point, and that a regeneration plan needs to be implemented, writes KITTY HOLLAND

DOLPHIN HOUSE, the largest local authority flat complex in the State, and the centre of a battle for control between drug-dealers, An Garda Síochána and residents, has the potential to be a lovely place to live.

Set on 18 acres of grassland on the banks of the Grand Canal, it is within walking distance of Dublin city centre. It is low-density housing, with about eight blocks of four storeys each, where more than 1,000 people live in the 436 flats. There’s an all-weather pitch, a homework club, a youth club and a senior citizens’ unit.

In driving rain this week, however, it feels bleak, cut-off and sprawling. There are open grassy spaces. Young trees have been planted about the estate, though many of the slender trunks have been snapped. Rubbish is strewn about and doors and windows are broken, boarded up. Graffiti adorns many of the walls.

A young man is smoking over a balcony on a top floor. He is one few people about. Most are women, some pushing buggies, some still in their pyjamas, and few willing to talk to a journalist.

Standing in one stairwell three young women are poring over that day’s evening newspaper, with its report on an alleged violent incident involving two women in the complex the previous day.

During the few hours spent there by The Irish Times, two community gardaí are a constant, wandering presence, with bright yellow, high-visibility vests over their uniforms. It is their presence that has given rise to the hoax pipe-bombs, the vandalisation of scores of cars and the general intimidation that have focused national attention on life here.

The first reports of cars being vandalised in the complex, in an alleged attempt to warn residents against seeking more Garda patrols, came last weekend. On Monday night, a suspect device was planted outside the community centre, where a meeting had just got underway to discuss drug-dealing and anti-social behaviour. Attended by about 100 people, it had been called by residents as their first attempt to respond to a worsening situation.

The device turned out to be a Pringles box, with some protruding wires and tape wrapped around it. Nonetheless, the Army bomb- disposal unit was called, a controlled explosion was carried out and the entire complex was evacuated.

By Tuesday afternoon, radio switchboards were lit up with calls from residents speaking about ongoing intimidation by drug-dealers.

“They are hitting back at the residents because the Garda have been here 24 hours a day,” said one woman, named only as Deirdre, who called RTÉ’s Liveline programme. “I heard people were afraid to go to the meeting on Monday night, because they’re watching who’d be going.”

Now facing into this bank-holiday weekend, residents are “terrified”, says Rory Hearne, regeneration officer with the Dolphin House Community Development Association. “People are frightened to go outside their door and are terrified they are going to be abandoned by the guards and by Dublin City Council this weekend. They just want to get out.”

There is a “growing despair”, he adds, and the community is at a “tipping point”.

Drugs are at the root of Dolphin House’s immediate problems. But there is longer-term concern that the promised and yearned-for Dolphin House regeneration plan is, like other regeneration plans drawn up during the good times, all but off the agenda.

NONE OF THE residents I speak to this week will give their names.

“It’s all right living here,” says a woman in her twenties, “though you get sick of all the shit. It’s all the drug-dealing.”

“I just come and go, keep myself to myself,” says another woman, in her thirties, with short, bleached hair. “There’s only a few lads causing all the hassle. There’s too many police for them now, and they’re losing business. And people are getting caught in the middle.”

Her analysis chimes with that of Supt Thady Muldoon, of Kevin Street Garda Station, who says there are eight to 10 individuals – all men in their late teens or twenties – dealing cocaine, crack and heroin out of Dolphin House. Pointing to a noticeboard of mugshots on the wall of the drugs unit office at Kevin Street, a member of the unit says the dealers operating in Dolphin House are a “gang” who are “friends since they were kids . . . They have hangers-on, some of them coming in from Crumlin, some as young as 15 they have carrying the stuff around for them.

“We can stop them, carry out house searches. We can arrest them if we have evidence, but they might get four months and then they’re out after two and a half and straight back at it.”

On policing, Supt Muldoon says: “There has been a drug problem in the south inner city since the 1980s. An awful lot of money has been poured into the area. There are two drugs task forces operating with wide community support. But we have one of the highest per-capita number of drug addicts and the number of treatment places has never kept pace.”

Waiting times for a methadone programme in the area are up to 27 weeks.

Four community gardaí are specifically assigned to Dolphin House. Others are assigned to such problem areas as St Teresa’s Gardens flats, Oliver Bond Street flats, Bridgefoot Street, Bluebell, St Michael’s Estate in Inchicore, the Michael Mallin area and Thomas Street.

For each area, the drugs unit has a noticeboard covered with mugshots of dealers.

“It seems to me sometimes that every second person is dealing drugs,” says a unit Garda who doesn’t want to be named. “The demand for drugs is everywhere, just enormous.”

Supt Muldoon says progress in other parts of the city means that open dealing is continually moving on – from the boardwalk on the Liffey to Aston Quay, from there to the IFSC, then from Fatima Mansions to St Teresa’s Gardens and Dolphin House.

“Dolphin House has become known as a place you can score. People are coming from all over the city,” he says. “I am the first to say that we are never going to cure any addict. Our job is to police the problem, and really all we can do most of the time is move it on.”

Which is exactly what the residents want. They want the increased Garda presence to continue, but in the long term they are adamant that regeneration must happen. There is a fear that unless the gardaí deal with the drugs, there will be violence and vigilantism.

“There is a lot of good happening,” says Rory Hearne, but the place is getting more and more run-down. It needs a lot of basic maintenance – doors, windows – and there are sewage problems with waste water coming back up into people’s flats.”

THERE ARE MORE than 500 registered voters in Dolphin House and Hearne says there will be a campaign to get people voting on the regeneration issue.

“Dolphin House is at a tipping point. Unless resources are put into it, it is going to become a sink ghetto. We already see residents looking for transfers out. Unless regeneration happens, Dolphin House is going to deteriorate further, problems are going to get worse. That is the reality of poverty and the State must take responsibility for it.”