Council plans to start major upgrades to Meath Street in August

In a conference room in the Liberties’ Hyatt Centric hotel on Dean Street, maps showing proposed changes to Meath Street were spread across tables. 

They were three copies of the same map, each copy stretched over two A1 pages, each on its own table.  

It was after 6pm on Wednesday. Locals had been dropping into the hotel for a couple of hours to inspect the plans, and to ask their questions of council officials and the design team from DBFL Consulting Engineers.

Designs for the busy shopping street in the heart of the Liberties have already gone through rounds of public consultation.

They’ve also been given the go-ahead by councillors, through the planning process known as Part 8. 

So “the detailed design is almost totally complete”, said Dublin City Council senior engineer Derek Dixon as he stood over the plans. 

But he and his colleagues were still taking stock of any comments made by those who dropped by to that evening’s public information session, Dixon said.

A slideshow on a screen at the back of the room flipped through images of how the street is supposed to eventually look, with views from both ground and sky.

The final slide announced that construction should start in August.

That timeline, however, depends on Uisce Éireann getting some essential works done first though, Dixon said.

A pipe that runs down the west of the street is an 1860s cast iron main, he said. “So it’s about 160 years old and there is no point in us doing a huge public realm scheme without that water main being renewed.”

The project, once it breaks ground, includes a zebra crossing near the Liberty Market and wider footpaths to support on-street traders, he says. 

“The idea is to make sure that they are widened so that the existing street trading can continue,” said Dixon. “That’s the plan.”

Wider, greener, less leaky

Improvements to Meath Street have been a long time coming, says Máire Devine, the local Sinn Féin TD. “I’ve been anxious to have attention paid to the long-neglected Meath Street area.”

As far back as 2018, the council had been looking at how to revamp the commercial street.

Five years later, in December 2023, councillors voted to progress the project, estimated to cost €4.5 million at the time.

The width of its pavements were “less than optimal”, it lacked seating, greenery and “visual coherence”, and the surface materials were poor, said a planning document at the time.

Changing shopping habits had also left empty shops, the document says.

Empty shops are more of an issue at the south end of the street towards the Coombe than the north, said local historian and activist James Madigan, as he sat in the grotto behind St Catherine’s Church. 

“Books At One closed, because it wasn’t getting enough business,” Madigan said. Not too far away, The Liberty Bakery and Deli has been shuttered for more than a decade.

To try to help remedy that, the council and its contractors’ plan is to ease travel for pedestrians along the street, said Dixon on Wednesday.

Nearly everywhere, the design will widen footpaths, he said. “The street is one-way and in some places it is down to the bare one lane.”

At the north end, by Thomas Street, Meath Street will still have two lanes that are 3 metres wide each, he says.  “Our narrowest point is 3.6 metres, and the reason for that is it’s the width of a fire tank.”

Cycle stands are going in. Parking spaces are dropping from 41 to 13, including two for people with disabilities or mobility issues. Most parking is to be along the northern end, and five loading bays are to go in, predominantly on the southern end.

The disabled parking spaces are on opposite ends of the street too, Dixon says.

Greening the street is also a major objective. Plans show 18 trees. 

Currently, there aren’t any on the street, Dixon says. “Of course, those are always a challenge because the subterranean landscape is full of services. So you can’t just put a tree in anywhere. You have to engineer the space to put them in.”

Dixon says that Uisce Éireann shouldn’t need to dig up the whole street to do its bit of work, ahead of the project. “They do it in pits..”

A Uisce Éireann spokesperson said on Monday that they plan to start work in the summer, replacing 1km of water main in the area as part of the National Leakage Reduction Programme. 

While Uisce Éireann does that, Dixon says, the council plans to go to tender with a view to having the contractor on site in the third quarter of 2025.

Keep the momentum

On Saturday afternoon, a long line of cars idled at the bottom of Meath Street, readying to turn out onto a busy Thomas Street.

The sun was shining down on the street corner where Catherine O’Connor stood at her flower stall with a friend who had been helping out.

The works are a good thing, she said. “Will it be good for us traders? It will. But it could be good for everybody, because we need more people to come in.”

Meath Street needs to be properly cared for, she says. Brighter. Greener. “The place is filthy. It needs a good bucket of water power washing.”

It needs the Stoneybatter treatment, she says. “All the lampposts painted lovely bright colours and kept lovely and clean. This is all scruffy greys, and markers written all over it. Why can’t we have more colour? I like colour.”

She points to a fellow trader, who stops by.

“He likes colour,” she says.

Regeneration can’t stop at widening the footpaths, says Devine, the Sinn Féin TD. It needs better lighting, shop fronts fixed up. “We need to reactivate empty spaces.”

It is in a working-class district that has an “intangible cultural heritage” because of its street traders, she says. “So it’s a community we really need to cherish and support.”

The loss of parking though is going to be a worry, she says. “The loss of business could be an issue there.”

While the detailed designs are all but completed, what has been set out by the council should not be the be-all-and-end-all of revitalising Meath Street, said Madigan on Tuesday morning.

The plans on display in the Hyatt should be treated as “the latest” designs, but the council should keep checking if anything else can be added or improved in the coming months, and right up until they are working on site, he says.

While the water main needs to be sorted out, there is still a chance to listen to locals and gather more input, he says. “It is a really good chance for extra time to have a think, listen to the shopkeepers.”

He is impressed by the regeneration plans, but wants them to expand out and look at “dead spaces” around the area, extending the public realm wherever possible, he says. 

“The back of the old Coombe Hospital, there’s a wonderful space behind the grotto that would be wonderful for biodiversity,” he says. “It’s a real opportunity to actually do something.”