After years of work by council, government abruptly spiked policy meant to deliver arts spaces in the city

When Darragh Moriarty woke on 6 July, to see headlines about the Department of Housing’s new guidelines around design standards for apartments, he was bewildered, he said. “It was hugely dispiriting.”

Among the changes, the new standards got rid of Dublin City Council’s policy requiring developers to build community and cultural spaces as part of large apartment complexes, says Moriarty, a Labour councillor. 

“It was just a footnote at the end of reports, and that was the thing I latched onto straight away,” he says.

The council had already done an enormous amount of work to implement this new policy, which the department had just swept away.

The council’s Arts Office had consulted with many developers since late 2023. Staff had built a toolkit to support developers, and set up a “matchmaking” registry to put them in touch with artists.

“There are existing sites around Dublin that are in discussion with local community groups about entering arrangements,” said Moriarty, who chairs the council’s arts strategic policy committee, and the artists workspace committee. 

Councillors involved in developing this policy are still trying to get their heads around what has just happened, says Social Democrats Councillor Cat O’Driscoll. “Working out what happens next is pretty difficult.”

A spokesperson for the council did not respond when asked if this has impacted current projects where the developer has engaged with the City Arts Office to deliver infrastructure as part of the policy.

Wasted effort

The council’s policy, fastened into its development plan for 2022 to 2028, required developers to give 5 percent of space in major projects, above 10,000 square metres, over to cultural and communal facilities.

Those could be exhibition or performance spaces, or artist studios, according to the development plan.

When it was put in place, councillors didn’t expect every developer to immediately be on board, said O’Driscoll, the Social Democrats councillor. “We knew it was going to be challenged.”

There was a chance the policy could trigger legal action from developers who either couldn’t make the 5 percent work or didn’t find it viable, the City Arts Officer Ray Yeates told the council’s Arts and Culture Advisory Group, according to the minutes from the group’s meeting on 10 February.

To minimise these challenges, the Arts Office and the council’s Artist Workspace Committee drove for as much engagement with developers as possible, O’Driscoll says. “The Arts Office were meeting with developers on a very regular basis.”

Yeates had met with 25 developers in November 2023, at which stage their responses were negative, according to the minutes from the council’s Arts and Cultural Advisory Group (ACAG) meeting on 10 February.

The scheme was seen by developers as a reduction of the return on their developments, the minutes show.

Out of this work, a cultural infrastructure toolkit was built, specifically to help the developers, O’Driscoll says. “One of the pieces of advice we had for developers was to hire a consultant that knows the industry.”

A few developers positively engaged with the toolkit and after 2023, feelings towards the policy evolved from negative to mixed, Yeates told the ACAG in February.

Back in March, the Arts Office set up a registry for arts and cultural groups looking for temporary or permanent work spaces to smooth the roll out of the policy.

Then, in the new guidelines issued on 8 July, the Minister for Housing, Fianna Fáil TD James Browne, declared that the policy was no longer mandatory. 

“Communal, Community and Cultural Facilities: The need for these facilities are not to be required as mandatory for individual apartment schemes and are to be determined at a broader level on a plan-led basis,” says a statement from the Department of Housing.

A massive amount of time and resources had gone into the policy, says O’Driscoll, the Social Democrats councillor. “It would be hard to quantify, but I don’t even think there’s a respect for that. It does feel like a big slap across the face when so much engagement was done.”

As a council, getting this policy right was taken seriously, O’Driscoll said at the full council meeting on 7 July.

“What we’re going to see is less spaces for culture, less spaces for community, and our development plan analysis showed us we’re lacking those spaces across the city,” she said.

A spokesperson for the council did not respond when asked if they could provide an outline of the costs and resources to date used for implementing the policy.

Audits

The new guidelines specify that communal or cultural facilities shall not be required on a mandatory threshold basis, a spokesperson for the Department of Housing said on Monday, “as they are likely to have implications in terms of the viability of the development”.

The need for any such facilities should be identified in a statutory plan at a broader level, they said, “rather than applied to individual apartment schemes”.

If there is a need for facilities, these should be determined by an audit process, the guidelines say.

These cultural and social infrastructure audits look for gaps in existing local amenities and facilities, as well as an anticipated demand that could be generated by the new development, it says.

According to the Development Plans Guidelines for Planning Authorities (2022), a development plan should include an objective to prepare a community, social and cultural audit in areas that expect to see a growth in their populations.

Those 2022 guidelines, cited by the new ones, pointed to Dublin City’s 2021 Cultural Infrastructure Audit as a recent example.

That audit, prepared for the city’s 2022 to 2028 development plan, found that big areas of the city have no cultural buildings outside of the libraries.

And only 11 of 249 cultural buildings mapped in the city, with some form of public subsidy or grant aid, were of a high enough standard for making professional cultural work.

What is the fall-out?

Last week, on 9 July, the government also gave its approval to bring forward further amendments to the Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2025.

These would allow a development scheme that currently has planning permission, but that hasn’t been commenced, to be altered within certain parameters without the need for a new planning application, a spokesperson for the Department said.

This should not impact on current developments, like Marshall Yards where Eagle Street Partners are set to deliver a space for exhibitions alongside 554 apartments as work on the project is already underway and set for completion in the first quarter of 2026, according to Eagle Street’s website.

The bill and amendments are currently being examined in Seanad Éireann, before it is signed into law. During a Seanad debate on 10 July, Sinn Féin Senator Chris Andrews asked if the developer of the Poolbeg Glass Bottle site would be getting rid of the arts, cultural and community spaces planned there.

That site is in a strategic development zone, Andrews said, which is being developed by the Ronan Group Real Estate and Lioncor.

The Minister of State at the Department of Housing, Fine Gael TD John Cummins, did not address Andrews’ question.

A spokesperson for the Ronan Group did not respond when asked if they were going to drop plans for any of the cultural or community spaces in the development.

Moving forward

Before the Department of Housing issued its new guidelines, the council’s artists workspace committee was still attempting to get the 5 percent policy off the ground.

At its meeting on 23 June, members discussed how to implement and enforce the cultural space in new developments, and expressed their concerns about developers avoiding or minimising the obligation, minutes show.

Ángel Luis González Fernández, the director of PhotoIreland, who was at the meeting, says it is always going to be hard getting developers on board with a policy that requires them to give up 5 percent of a costly project. 

González Fernández was invited to speak as PhotoIreland is set to launch the International Centre for Image at Coopers Cross on 17 July, consisting of a gallery, library, workshop, studios and office spaces, he says.

PhotoIreland’s new centre is leased for 10 years, with a three-year break clause, says González Fernández, and at the June meeting, he said its sustainability is supported through public funding, private support and revenue from the Library Project, PhotoIreland’s bookshop in Temple Bar.

The basement, in which the new centre is located was provided by Kennedy Wilson, who also funded its fit-out, the minutes from the meeting say, noting that while not a part of the 5 percent policy, it aligned with council’s placemaking goals.

Placemaking is a combined approach to planning, design and management of public spaces, which gives vitality to, and promotes activity in an area, according to the council’s development plan. 

The creation of any infrastructure should be more collaborative with a local community, González Fernández says. “Rather than demand 5 percent from a developer, we should work with them in the provision of something.”

Ultimately, the 5 percent policy wasn’t enticing enough, he says. “You need something a bit more positive, something a bit more defined.”

Still, at the end of the day, it’s “gut-wrenching” that this particular route to improve cultural infrastructure has been cut off, says Moriarty, the Labour councillor. 

“As a local representative, you think the thing you do have power over is the development plan. So much time and energy went into that,” he said.

“A stroke of a pen, a line at the bottom of these department guidelines kills us,” he says. “Frustrating doesn’t do it justice. It’s the overreach, the undermining of local government.”