They were installed to keep people from camping there, while waiting for better shelter – or decisions on their asylum cases.
Along Lower Mount Street on Tuesday afternoon, the zig-zagging fences cordoned off big stretches of the footpath between Merrion Square and the Grand Canal.
Weeds behind them grew up, almost two-foot tall.
Two people, unable to walk around the bus shelter outside the International Protection Office (IPO) in Ballaugh House, awkwardly shuffled through the small crowd waiting for their buses.
On Grattan Street, more fences surrounded a car parking meter, running between the edge of car parking spaces and the pavement.
Around the corner on Grattan Court East, the fences were densely packed together, most of the footpath inaccessible.
Dublin City Council put up the fences in the streets around the IPO on 1 May, to stop people who have sought asylum but not yet been offered shelter by the state, from camping outside the offices.
But while the tents are gone, there’s no end in sight for the barriers.
“What is the plan here?” said Pat Connolly, as he poured a cup of coffee in his apartment overlooking Grattan Street last Friday. “There’s litter accumulating. There are safety, mobility issues, and accidents waiting to happen.”
It’s not a suitable solution for the four months now that they’ve been there, he says. “But now, for them to be extended?”
The council had said they would be there until 31 August. On 12 September, a council spokesperson said it would be at least another two months before they are removed.
“But the matter will be kept under review,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
While Connolly and other locals wait, impatiently for an unspecified date in the coming months when these fences, and the ones nearby on the Grand Canal, will be removed, they are asking for other measures.
Grattan Court East smelled of bleach on the morning of 1 May.
On Lower Mount Street, cranes lifted empty tents up off the footpath while people in hazmat suits dragged others away from the scene.
People who had been sheltering there in the tents stood by, their belongings in shopping bags and backpacks, as buses arrived to escort them away.
Ruth Hamilton, the co-owner of Mamma Mia, an Italian restaurant on Grattan Street, says her business was within an area fenced off during the operation.
“We missed out on a good half day’s trading with no notice,” she says. “We only found out through social media.”
Both Hamilton and Connolly are a part of Mount Street Lower Residents, a network of local residents and businesses set up in late April as the number of people seeking asylum but left without proper accommodation grew, and a growing number camped outside the IPO.
Among the group’s focus since late April has been to question the adequacy of the existing IPO as a location for processing protection applications, says Connolly. “After 18 months of chaos here, it’s clear that the IPO can’t operate in a city centre street.”
That is something that the Department of Justice had looked at before, although it isn’t clear what prompted the discussion at that time.
Representatives from the department met in March 2019 with the Office of Public Works to discuss a relocation of the IPO. Emails show that the OPW was looking for options in Dublin 1, 2, or 7.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said on Tuesday that it has no plans to cease to rely on the existing premises on Mount Street.
Distributing the service out across different areas would be better, says Fianna Fail TD Jim O’Callaghan, who has been engaging with the residents’ group. “Could you not get different areas, different locations where people apply.”
There is too much pressure concentrated on Mount Street, because it is the state’s only IPO, O’Callaghan says. Other European countries don’t just have one place, he says.
It is spread out in a lot of the Nordic countries, he says. “You can apply in police stations too, and consideration should be given by the government to taking pressure off Mount Street.”
“And that’s why I’m asking the Minister for Justice to give consideration to designating other locations as suitable for applications,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said that since 10 April, the IPO has operated a second location for registering families accompanied by children at Citywest Convention Centre in Saggart. That facility “has greater capacity to process families with children”.
As of 16 September, about half of all new applications have been made there, they said.
Between 1 May and 31 August, Dublin City Council has spent €62,880, excluding VAT, on fencing off the streets around the IPO, a council spokesperson said on Tuesday.
The barriers have been effective in stopping people setting up camps on footpaths, they said.
But it also pushed people with their tents a few hundred metres down the street and onto the walkways along the Grand Canal – where similar barricades were erected by Waterways Ireland.
Councillors have objected to that.
To call it heavy-handed was an understatement, said Green Party Councillor Carolyn Moore at a meeting of the South East Area Committee on 8 July.
“The management of the canal may be in the hands of Waterways Ireland, but we do recognise in our development plan that the canal is one of our most important ecological corridors through the city,” she said.
It also provided one of the most used pieces of safe segregated cycling in the city, she said.
In a letter to councillors on 16 August, Chief Executive Officer John McDonagh wrote that Waterways Ireland was committed to reopening all sections of the Grand Canal with the temporary fencing.
“We acknowledge that the current fencing situation along a stretch of the canal is not ideal, but necessary to mitigate risk to health and safety, which is our overriding concern,” he wrote.
They were looking at solutions, such as accelerating work to landscape the stretch, he wrote. The kind of measures it is looked at is in its activation plan for the Grand Canal, said a statement on Waterways Ireland website on 10 September.
In the interim, the statement said the body had also introduced enhanced monitoring of the canal, with two security personnel patrolling the area.
On Tuesday evening, as the sun beamed down over the canal, two security men in pink and black hi-vis vests stood by on the Huband Bridge next to Warrington Place.
There weren’t any tents around. Fences covered the grassy strips, hemming in the footpaths.
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.
