Council Briefs: Cleaning up the city, installing gates at Robinson’s Court, and the North Irish Sea Array wind farm

Council tenders for CCTV for four locations

The council’s head of waste management, Barry Woods, presented plans to keep the city’s streets cleaner, at the September monthly meeting of Dublin City Council on Monday 2 September in the Mansion House.

Much of this presentation echoed plans Woods had presented to the council’s climate action and environment committee in January, including hiring more staff to clean the streets, expanding the part of the city that gets a 24-hour cleaning service, and making more people put their rubbish out in bins instead of bags.

However, Lord Mayor James Geoghegan, a Fine Gael councillor, said there would also be another “very significant change”.

“It will no longer be the case that commercial premises can present their waste in plastic bin bags,” he said. Seagulls, foxes and other creatures often tear open plastic bags and leave rubbish strewn across the streets.

Independent Councillor Cieran Perry said he welcomed the initiative. But in his 15 years on the council, “there’s been an awful lot of false dawns”, he said. “I’m hoping that there will be a significant change going forward.”

Fine Gael Councillor Ray McAdam said he welcomed, among other aspects of this plan, “The fact that the new CCTV under the legislation passed by government will be coming in place imminently.”

“In parts of East Wall, the North Strand, others … rubbish and dumping at bottle banks has gone – it’s at apocalyptic levels,” McAdam said. “The likes of CCTV there is essential.”

The council used to use CCTV to record and publicly shame illegal dumpers. Then this was judged illegal. In 2022, however, the government brought in a new law re-legalising the use of CCTV to tackle illegal dumping.

After much ado, finalising the law, the regulations, the code of practice and the guidance on how to proceed, in April the council issued a tender asking for bids from companies that are interested in providing CCTV services.

In this initial effort to restart an anti-dumping CCTV programme, “Typically a minimum of 4 locations will be monitored on a 24/7 basis. The number of sites where these services are required may increase or decrease at short notice,” the tender says.

“While the CCTV services will primarily focus on unmanned Bring Centres, there may be a requirement to provide CCTV services at other locations from time to time,” it says. The three-year contract has an estimated value of €4.5 million.

Delays installing security gate at Robinson’s Court

At Monday’s council meeting, Sinn Féin Councillor Máire Devine said she was frustrated with the continued delays in installing a security gate at Robinson’s Court, a complex for senior citizens off Cork Street in Dublin 8.

“Over a year ago the gates at Robinson’s Court were agreed after a long session of fighting for them,” Devine said.

“When you can get the gates at Leinster House done in the same day. And you can get gates put for laneways, but where three elderly people have been murdered and lots more activity down there, it’s shameful,” she said.

In 2006, 80-year-old Vincent Plunkett was murdered in his flat at Robinson’s Court, a senior citizens’ complex off Cork Street. In 2016, 61-year-old Anthony Rogers was murdered in his. In 2021, 76-year-old Kwok Ping Chen was murdered in his.

Tenants have been calling for better security for years, and former People Before Profit Councillor Tina MacVeigh, and Devine, raised the issue repeatedly with council managers.

After a council committee backed in the idea in 2023, the council had gates built and installed by late February at one end of Hardwicke Street to keep people visiting the hospital from parking where residents of the flats there want to.

After a man rammed gates to Leinster House in the early hours of 2 August 2024, repair works to the damaged gates were reportedly underway later that same morning.

In a 13 December 2023 report, council managers said “The new security gate [for Robinson’s Court] is currently being fabricated and is scheduled for installation in the early New Year.”

But it wasn’t.

At a meeting of the council’s South Central Area Committee on 7 May, executive manager Bruce Phillips told Devine that “it is disappointing to see this work taking such a long time”.

“There are contractual issues here,” he said. “It’s turned out to be a rather complicated and complex job, involving different kinds of electrical and mechanical engineering issues, procurement issues – and we took much longer to sort our way through those issues than we ever envisioned.”

“But what’s most important here is we’re absolutely committed to providing those gates, and they will be provided,” Phillips says.

At Monday’s meeting, in response to Devine’s frustration at the slow pace of the fabrication and installation of gates at Robinson’s Court, council Assistant Chief Executive Frank D’Arcy said he’d look into it.

“I’ll be onto you myself before the end of the week in relation to that. I’ll follow up and find out what’s the delay,” he said.

Councillors weigh in on North Irish Sea Array wind farm

Also at Monday’s meeting, Dublin city councillors were asked for their views on plans to build an offshore wind farm in the Irish Sea.

An Bord Pleanála is considering an application to build the North Irish Sea Array (NISA) wind farm, which will be about 11km offshore.

It’s being developed by Statkraft, a Norwegian state-owned power company, and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a Danish investment firm. “The wind farm will have the capacity to power the equivalent of approximately half a million Irish homes,” according to Statkraft.

It’d be off the coast of Balbriggan, roughly – with electricity cables coming onshore at Bremore, and then running south, into the northern fringe of the Dublin City Council area to Belcamp.

“So a very, very small part of this application is within DCC,” City Planner Deirdre Scully said at Monday’s meeting, as she presented a report on the project, which includes comments on the project from various council offices.

This is all part of the new legislative process that’s been set up for planning applications for offshore wind farms, Scully said.

The law calls for this type of report to be presented to councillors, and for councillors’ comments on it to be included in a submission from the council to the board as part of the planning process, she said.

“This is the first time we’ve been asked to exercise this piece of legislation, but it won’t be the only time,” Scully said.

Green Party Councillor Donna Cooney said she “very much” welcomed the project. Among other things, she focused in on a section in the council report that talks about using electricity from the wind farm to power district heating projects in future.

District heating is when there’s a big central source of heat and – for example – pipes bring hot water from it into the radiators in people’s homes. Rather than each home having its own boiler to heat water to heat their radiators.

Bringing in district heating systems to replace oil-fired and gas-fired boilers in people’s homes, and in offices and other buildings, is part of the government’s plans to reduce carbon emissions, to help Ireland do its part in trying to keep the climate changes now underway from worsening too much further.

The report says, “Dublin City Council encourages the future integration of the North Irish Sea Array Wind Farm with future potential district heating networks in the North Fringe area of the city, should they be developed.”

Cooney said she’d like to see that section made a bit stronger, “as that would be something we’d be very much supportive of”.

Commenting on the plans for the NISA wind farm, independent Councillor Mannix Flynn said “I think this is a very, very serious matter”.

“These are really, really significant developments that are going to have a massive impact on our environment,” he said. “And while there’s a lot of benefit from them, there’s deep, deep, deep public concern.”

People Before Profit Councillor Conor Reddy said he would “absolutely welcome the development of offshore wind”.

“It’s a massive resource we have in Ireland for generating power and we’re laggards in some ways in taking advantage of that resource,” he said. “We’re still very far from where we need to be in terms of renewable energy generation.”

But the wind energy could be used not only to further decarbonise Ireland’s electricity supply, but also “to take pressure off people who’ve suffered for years under the weight of energy costs”, Reddy said.

“I think I’d express concern that this is going to be a privately developed wind farm rather than a public resource,” he  said.