An Taisce has sub-leased part of the historic Liberties building to a publican. Some local councillors said there are more pressing needs in the area than a pub.
The council should take back Tailors’ Hall from heritage group An Taisce, and make it available for a “community use”, according to a motion agreed by local councillors last Wednesday.
The building, originally a guild hall, which is more than 300 years old, is a protected structure. Just across Back Lane from the Iveagh Markets, in the Liberties, it is council-owned, but on a 99-year lease to An Taisce, a council spokesperson says.
In 2022, An Taisce – a charity established to preserve heritage – sublet the basement and ground floor to publican Liberties Renaissance Ltd, which did them up and opened a pub and beer gardens there.
Independent Councillor Mannix Flynn has repeatedly criticised this change of use. At a meeting of the council’s South Central Area Committee last Wednesday he proposed a motion to try to reverse it.
The councillors on the committee should call on council managers “to take in charge the historical Tailors Hall building … and make it available for community use within the area which is in great need of community facilities”, the motion said.
In a roll-call vote, councillors on the committee deadlocked on the issue, with four voting in favour and four against. The chair of the committee, Right to Change Councillor Sophie Nicoullaud, declared the motion agreed.
But Bruce Phillips, the council’s South Central Area manager, said the council wasn’t about to move to take back the building into council control. The council’s planning enforcement section is investigating the situation, Phillips said.
“This is a live investigation, it’s an ongoing investigation, and the city council are not going to be making any decisions in relation to the lease or sub-lease until those investigations are fully completed,” he said.
An Taisce, through an independent communications advisor, said Monday that “we will not be making any comment on that engagement or on the commentary of others on this case until such time as that process has concluded”.
Although council managers hold a lot of power, one of the powers or “reserved functions” that councillors still have is approval over “disposals” – the sale or lease of council-owned properties.
On the agenda of last Wednesday’s South Central Area Committee, for example, was a proposed lease of a council-owned creche facility in Inchicore to the Family Resource Centre – for councillors’ approval.
The council leased Tailors’ Hall to An Taisce from 25 March 1968, for 99 years, according to a response by the council’s chief executive to questions from Flynn.
At Wednesday’s meeting, Phillips, the area manager, said the council had agreed in a 10 March 2022 letter to let An Taisce sub-lease to the Liberties Renaissance Ltd.
Flynn, the independent councillor, said that legally, if councillors are responsible for leases, they’re responsible for all parts of those, including sub-leases.
But Phillips said that “Consent of a sub-lease does not require the approval of the elected members”.
Asked who’s right, a spokesperson for the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage said “it is a matter for the local authority, or the member, to seek legal advice on this matter, if necessary”.
Aside from this issue of whether council managers had the power to approve a sub-lease without input from councillors, councillors also questioned the change of use.
Independent Councillor Vincent Jackson said he couldn’t understand how An Taisce were allowed “basically to hand the building over they got for a specific purpose … to protect the built heritage of our country” to the company to use as a pub.
Adding to that sense that the building is not being put to the use the council intended when it leased it to An Taisce, the heritage organisation has apparently moved its main offices out of Tailors’ Hall.
Between October and November of last year, the address listed on An Taisce’s website for its “main office” was changed away from Tailor’s Hall, to an address on Foster Place. An Taisce has not directly addressed a query about this sent Friday.
Articles from 1966 through 1968 in the Irish Times archive tell how a group of organisations including An Taisce and the Irish Georgian Society ran a public campaign to raise tens of thousands of pounds to restore Tailors’ Hall at that time.
The building had been vacant and decaying. A 5 December 1967 article in the Irish Times says Dublin City Council had the evening before approved a lease to Tailor’s Hall Fund Ltd for 99 years at an annual rent of 1 shilling (one-twentieth of a pound).
The article says the lease was on the condition that the group restore the building within five years. “The building will be used for exhibitions, lectures and concerts,” it says.
Neither An Taisce nor Dublin City Council have responded to queries sent Monday as to whether this lease described in the 1967 article was the same one the council says is currently relevant and assigned to An Taisce.
They also did not respond to requests for a copy of the current lease between Dublin City Council and An Taisce.
If the use of the council-owned building was going to change, councillors should have been given a chance to weigh in, Flynn and other councillors said at last week’s meeting.
“The very fact that they’re no longer using it for what they intended to use it, it should come back to the council,” said Jackson, the independent councillor.
“We’re always talking about needing buildings for arts and community purposes, and so it should have come back to the council to discuss,” he said.
Labour Councillor Darragh Moriarty said similar. “There’s been a lack of community and public amenity space in the Liberties,” he said.
“We regularly have community development projects, youth groups, all sorts of groups coming to us, telling us they don’t have anywhere to go to deliver their community projects, and here’s a public building that is not being used for public use”, he said.
Indeed, said Sinn Féin Councillor Máire Devine, “our communities are well lacking”, she said. And beyond that, the building “is such a beauty, Dublin 8 has so many gems and this is up there with them”, she said.
“It feels disrespectful to have you know drink I think or alcohol or an atmosphere of that it just feels a bit disrespectful and I’m not a prude but it just feels like that,” Devine said.
Fundamentally, “Giving this building to a profit-making private company is just not good,” said independent Councillor Sophie Nicoullaud.
But Green Party Councillor Michael Pidgeon said, “The basement space there, which is where the pub is, and the back yard there – I actually don’t think this is a terrible use for it … I’ve been there, it’s not really my kind of place but it does seem nice enough and it’s getting people in there which is good”.
Pidgeon said he’d also been to an event about arts in the Liberties, and one for the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre in the main hall upstairs. It’s “difficult to know how to access but it seems really ideal for community meetings and events and that sort of thing”.
Maybe the best solution is to put the hall upstairs to community use, and leave the company to run the pub downstairs, Pidgeon suggested.
People Before Profit Councillor Hazel de Nortúin said she wouldn’t like to see the council take a person’s business away. “I think if there was an option of discussing with the owner or An Taisce before we start begging the option of closing down anybody’s business.”
Phillips, the council manager, said more than once that the council was not going to make a decision on taking the building back until it had finished its investigations into the situation.
The council is investigating two issues: whether the change of use was okay, and whether the work doing up the building was okay.
In a response to questions from Flynn, the council’s chief executive has said the council served an enforcement notice “in respect of multiple breaches of planning relating to physical works/structures that had been taken place/put in situ at the property”.
“The compliance date associated with this Enforcement Notice was the end of October 2023,” it said. “An inspection carried out by the Planning Enforcement Officer for the area has revealed that this Enforcement Notice has been complied with.”
But the investigation into the change of use continues, the response said. “Following the issuing of a statutory Warning Letter relating to the alleged change of use of the premises, a detailed response has recently being received”, it said.
The council is considering the response, and “A decision will be made in due course following the completion of our investigations as to whether further enforcement action is required”, it said.
Flynn sounded frustrated by Phillips’ repetition that nothing could be done at the moment because of the ongoing investigations.
“These aren’t judicial proceedings, these aren’t the law, governed by a particular law, they’re very simple procedures here,” Flynn said.
“You cannot hide behind, you know, an administrative situation to say, ‘Oh you know we’re not going to do anything cause there’s an ongoing investigation,’” he said.
He said he suspected this was a delay tactic by council managers, “a delay in the hope that I will go away”. Local elections are scheduled for June of this year.
If the council did decide to try to take the building back from An Taisce, there’d be significant costs involved, said Phillips, the area manager.
First there’s the matter of An Taisce’s lease, which has decades to run still. “To make that property available for community use would involve the acquisition of this residual lease which would come at a considerable cost to the council”, Phillips said.
Then there’s the question of turning it from what it is now, into whatever councillors decide it should be.
“The building as it stands now it’s a heritage building, it’s a historic building and its conversion and refurbishment to community use would be very costly and would be difficult,” Phillips said. “It’s not easily converted to modern-day community uses.”
Flynn said he believed the council or the government could find the money to do it if they wanted to.
“One has only got to look at the white-water rafting situation from Mr Owen Keegan before he left and the money that’s been spent on that,” Flynn said.
In 2019, council managers proposed – and councillors supported – building a whitewater rafting facility at George’s Dock, and a new council building nearby.
The whitewater rafting element was scrapped, but not before the council had spent €1.8 million on the project, according to the council.
However, it’s hard to untangle how much of that was spent on the whitewater rafting element, versus the quayside building element, which did go ahead, the council said.
At the meeting last week, Flynn also pointed to another project as evidence the council can find money for projects when it wants to.
“Indeed, the owner of the Iveagh Market, was given a gift, more or less, of €11 million to do up the building that he owns, by the minister,” Flynn said.
In September, the government announced €9 million in funding for “conservation works” at Iveagh Markets, which is crumbling away. (Says Flynn: The €11 million is “the estimated cost of the works and overruns”.)
The council leased the historic market building in the Liberties to developer Martin Keane in 1997, but they still they stand vacant, derelict and crumbling. And Keane, Lord Iveagh and Dublin City Council went to court to fight for its ownership.
“So I don’t understand why a similar situation can’t be used to bring a building like Tailors’ Hall back into public use considering they’re doing it for a developer Mr Martin Keane on the other side of the street”, Flynn said.
A little later, Pidgeon, the Green Party councillor, circled back to this point to say that it was not the committee’s view that Martin Keane owns Iveagh Markets.
“Our view is very much that that’s a Dublin City Council property and that’s the point that we’re currently in court fighting for,” he said.
But Flynn was adamant. “The Iveagh Markets are owned by Martin Keane.”
“Nope, don’t agree with that,” Pidgeon said.
“That’s a fact,” Flynn said.
At this point, the committee chair, Sophie Nicoullaud, stepped in.
“Okay, we’ll move on,” she said.
“Is my motion agreed?” Flynn asked.
“Agreed, yeah absolutely,” said Nicoullaud.
At which point a cacophony of voices erupted declaring that they thought it either was or wasn’t agreed.
“I think virtually every speaker on it said they admire what Mannix is doing, like myself, but don’t agree with the text of the motion” said Pidgeon.
So Nicoullaud called a roll-call vote.
When the meeting administrator Gabrielle Malone declared the result four votes in favour and four against, Nicoullaud decided the issue.
“We agree the motion,” she declared.
The government should tell communities directly about plans for new asylum shelters, some activists and politicians say.
The current skirmish is over a Manna base at Junction 6 in Blanchardstown.
The idea is for this spot next to Dublin Castle to host choirs, chamber music, trad music, poetry performances, and more.
