Sir, – Ana Kinsella is right (“We need to get people back living in Georgian Dublin to bring energy to the city’s finest streets”, Weekend, May 13th).
Our towns and cities are cratered with very little in the centre: faltering retail and restaurants, cafes and bars catering to a relatively distant populace who must travel to enjoy them. Even the cinemas have in the main departed to the suburbs. And yet the city and town centres are surely where life should be. That’s where the theatres are and where you find the layered history and fine architecture, the grand public buildings and vernacular architecture and the great urban views, and so many of the facilities that people require. Sadly, however, there are so few people living in our city and town centres, few apartments suitable for families, singletons, young couples, students or workers, etc. What has happened?
Some 50 years ago I was raised in the centre of a vibrant community in a small city in the south of the country. In our city centre block, with river views to the front and the steeples, roofs and chimneys of an 18th-century and 19th-century provincial townscape to the rear, families lived over their businesses. On our block every house was lived in: the GP lived over her surgery, the pharmacist over his shop, the publican over his bar, the bank manager over the big bank building on the corner, and we over the family business founded in 1847. And it was like this across the city. Today all those families have moved to the suburbs and these fine 18th-century houses now stand empty at night when the businesses close. In European towns and cities, this is not the case. They are full of life, and life demands services, facilities and useful shops, which flourish given the demand. And there are fewer demands on public transport.
My old family home however, like the dozen others in the block, was abandoned 35 to 40 years ago. The living accommodation is now empty, albeit with flourishing businesses underneath. It is still a beautiful place with the same wonderful views but these old homes now stand sad, unloved, and underused. Could it be that our building regulations and the planners have rendered these houses unusable, while we face a housing crisis and urban degeneration?
New Irish citizens: ‘I hear the racist and xenophobic slurs on the streets. Everything is blamed on immigrants’
Jack Reynor: ‘We were in two minds between eloping or going the whole hog but we got married in Wicklow with about 220 people’
‘I could have gone to California. At this rate, I probably would have raised about half a billion dollars’
Matt Williams: Take a deep breath and see how Sam Prendergast copes with big Fiji test
Why can’t there be incentives using some of those billions of euro to encourage owners to upgrade the accommodation and put the basic safety features in place? We need to use what we have and bring life back to our cities and towns. – Yours, etc,
EDMOND SMYTH,
Dublin 4.