There are lots of things Dublin city needs: a visible Garda presence on its streets, more housing, reuse of redundant commercial buildings, a crackdown on building owners who allow their properties to become derelict, better waste management, better regulated homeless services, more toilets and less traffic.
Arguably what Dublin doesn’t need is another report detailing what it needs, published by a government in its dying days.
An Post chief executive David McRedmond, who chaired the Taoiseach’s Dublin City Taskforce, is not oblivious to this obvious criticism. He addresses it in his foreword to the taskforce report published on Monday: “Dublin does not need a new plan,” he says frankly.
This is underscored by the appendix at the back of the report which details 73 plans, strategies and reports on the city the taskforce reviewed as part of its work.
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Most of the taskforce’s recommendations come from previous reports, Mr McRedmond acknowledges, but “have not yet been implemented or are subscale”, he says. Where the taskforce will be different is in its intention to deliver “at a scale and pace to surpass the scale of the external challenges”.
The taskforce outlines 10 “Big Moves”, some indeed ambitious in scale. The deployment of 1,000 additional gardaí on the city streets would make a huge difference to public safety, but also the perception of safety – vital to attracting people back to the city centre. In a similar vein it recommends more security on public transport and “city wardens” focused on tackling littering and antisocial behaviour.
It also recommends enacting legislation to prohibit social media platforms circulating footage of gardaí engaged in their work, again ambitious, but also impractical.
The report’s “big move” for “more targeted and better located services for vulnerable populations” includes a recommendation in a Dublin Region Homeless Executive report published exactly three years ago for bylaws to tackle the proliferation of volunteer groups handing out tents or providing other services to homeless people. This report was never implemented, possibly because of a certain squeamishness about cracking down on charitable people compensating for State neglect.
A recommendation to reuse vacant buildings for housing is far less controversial, and already in progress by the city council, but so far at a very limited scale. If this was expanded, it could make a real difference to the life of the city, but would be very, very expensive.
The taskforce acknowledges its recommendations could cost €1 billion to implement and €150 million a year to keep going. The Taoiseach, Simon Harris, has described this as a “manageable” amount and he will now convene an interdepartmental group to work on all the recommendations and report back on a three-year action plan, by mid-December, which will almost certainly be after the general election.
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