Back to the future with the Dublin City Taskforce report

The report that is supposed to lay out a blueprint for Dublin’s future has three titles: Dublin City Taskforce report; Taoiseach’s Taskforce for Dublin; and Capital City. If you think that’s repetitive, wait until you read it. Embodying the sense that this is all stuff we’ve seen before, six white men in suits lined up to deliver the answers to the future of the Irish capital: Councillor James Geoghegan of Fine Gael, An Taoiseach Simon Harris, Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman, Fianna Fáil’s Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien, Fine Gael’s Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe, and the taskforce chairman, An Post chief executive David McRedmond.
Ironically, women outnumbered men on the taskforce itself, making up seven of the 13 members. They also outnumber men in the population of the capital. It is simply incredible that nobody clocked the optics of an all-male line-up at the launch.
I have no doubt that those who created this report meant well and worked hard in creating it within a timeline where nothing comprehensive could ever be achieved. There are some occasionally good, if familiar, recommendations throughout. It does address some fundamentals; public housing, policing, and services for drug-users among them. But it is also an exercise in pointing out the obvious and repeating recommendations that have been made before.
The taskforce report sets out three common missions – more people living in the city centre, “streets that look cleaner and feel safer”, and “a healthy, vibrant, always-on city that respects its heritage”. Those are decent goals. Here are the ideas. Revitalise O’Connell Street and environs. Prioritise the total regeneration of social housing complexes in the city centre. Convert derelict sites into high-density residential with provision for essential workers. Make policing and security more visible and add 1,000 more gardaí. Deliver more targeted and better located services for vulnerable populations. Implement a dedicated waste management plan for the city centre. Operate the city centre transport plan with “agility”. Offer Dubliners “compelling reasons” to visit the city centre. Create “a marketing and communications function” for Dublin. “Evolve appropriate governance” for a capital city.
It’s hard not to greet a report that repeats existing ideas and recommends things that have been said so many times before with cynicism. Of the few “new” ideas, one pitch is redeveloping the GPO as a major public building – the taskforce is not making specific recommendations but said it received suggestions the building be used by RTÉ or a government department or as a museum. Moving what should be a state-of-the-art broadcaster into a museum building would be nonsensical.
In fairness, the report acknowledges its own superfluousness. “Dublin does not need a new plan,” McRedmond writes. “Most have been in previous reports,” he says. McRedmond points out that “systemic issues have become apparent which prevent good plans being implemented at pace. Most are outside the scope of the taskforce but need to be called out and addressed.” Call them out, sure, but that’s just talk. Later in the report, there’s this, “most of the report’s recommendations stem from previous reports or plans where implementation has been delayed or minimised”.
There are some confusing assertions. “Meanwhile-use is transforming Capel Street,” McRedmond writes. It is pedestrianisation, not meanwhile-use that has transformed Capel Street. “The Complex is an excellent example,” he writes. The Complex is not on Capel Street. It is an arts space on the corner of Arran Street East and Mary’s Abbey, and opened there in 2019. The report recommends reopening the Ambassador Theatre. This has already happened.
[ Taskforce recommends 10 ‘big moves’ to revitalise Dublin city centreOpens in new window ]
A single waste management provider to manage the entire waste of the city is another old idea. The council stopped collecting waste in 2012. Councillors voted to bring waste collection back under the council’s remit in 2019. A working group was established to conduct a feasibility study. The Institute for Public Administration told the council that excluding private operators would result in anticompetitive cases being brought in the courts. Establishing a “major programme to convert above-ground floor units for apartment living” is another, less than novel, idea.
The report recommends establishing “a grant aid system” whereby, for example, the HSE, An Garda Síochána and “local schools” would receive funding for purchasing or leasing homes for their employees. Such a system could only create a further layer of competition in the house-buying and rental market through bulk-buying and bulk-leasing.
A “security plan” for the city includes 1,000 extra gardaí, upgraded CCTV, and the “extension and expansion of private transport security” as well as “a broadening of their existing powers”. The latter is an alarming suggestion, essentially pitching a private police force, something that would cause very obvious issues, and rightly face opposition.
Also alarming is a recommendation to enact legislation to prohibit social media platforms from facilitating the circulation of videos, images or live streaming of gardaí engaged in their work without consent. While I appreciate that this impulse probably emerges from the antagonism gardaí experience while policing anti-immigrant protests, censoring videos of policing is not the answer to safety in Dublin. There isn’t even an effective national public antiracism campaign. Do that instead.
Another proposal is to “reimagine the current Dubline Trail as a key visitor attraction, similar to Boston’s Freedom Trail”. The Dubline Trail is an existing walk which, depending on whatever defunct details that still exist online you believe, either goes from the Garden of Remembrance or Stephen’s Green, to Kilmainham Gaol. There was an app. Leo Varadkar launched the project in 2013. The initiative cost €4 million.
Then there’s marketing the city. I’m all for changing the narrative, but that needs to come from changing the reality, not merely ramping up the PR. There is so much great stuff happening in the city, but there is also a legacy of silly and garbled marketing campaigns with slogans such as “We Can Dublin Again” or the generic “A Breath of Fresh Air”.
In order to tackle the implementation issues, the taskforce recommends establishing a taskforce implementation steering committee. Then another taskforce team should be established to develop the taskforce recommendations into a comprehensive costed three-year plan, to deliver “some aspects” of that plan directly, incorporate “the Dublin marketing team”, and then provide another report on “what has been achieved, what has not occurred and lessons for the future”. This argument for more bureaucracy does not exactly spark joy.
Finally, there’s that recommendation to hold a plebiscite for the establishment of a mayoral office. The Dublin Citizens’ Assembly of 2022 already voted for the city to have a mayor with responsibilities in 15 policy areas. A report by the Oireachtas Committee on Housing supported a vote in 2024. Another document, the programme for government, also recommended 2024 plebiscites for local authorities. In 2023, Cabinet considered that for the same date as the local and European elections in 2024. This was shot down as an idea. In fact, it was shot down by Simon Harris at a press conference announcing this very taskforce back in May. Five months later, we’re back where we started.