The chair of the city-centre taskforce, David McRedmond, wrote recently that the developer Ballymore has plans to “completely rebuild the Sheriff Street area”.
Residents on Sheriff Street Lower began to panic when they read last Sunday’s newspapers, says Mark Fay, chairperson of the North Wall Community Association.
There, in black and white in the Business Post, was an opinion piece from David McRedmond, chair of the Taoiseach’s city centre taskforce, bigging up a transformation of the city centre.
“If we transform the core, there are other amazing adjacent plans, such as [property developer] Ballymore’s, to completely rebuild the Sheriff Street area from Amiens Street to Spencer Dock,” wrote McRedmond.
To many residents on Sheriff Street, those lines confirmed their worst fears, says Fay: that social issues and drug dealing often pushed from the more heavily policed business districts in the area would be used as an excuse to demolish the street.
“For years, we have been talking about managed decline,” says Fay.
Already, Sheriff Street Lower is bordered on three sides by shiny new high-rises.
On Thursday at around midday, groups of neighbours stood chatting on the footpaths in front of the three-storey terraced homes, as tricolours fluttered from some windows above them.
Two soft toys – they look like a tiger and a monkey – sit together in a bird cage hanging outside someone’s door.
Residents here say they feel surrounded by all the new development. They have heard rumours for years that their homes would soon be levelled to make way for higher, more profitable, towers.
Fay, chairperson of the North Wall Community Association, says that's exactly what happened in the 1990s, when hundreds of homes in the Sheriff Street flats were levelled to make way for the International Financial Services Centre.
Back then, his father Gerry Fay was the chairperson of the community association.
At first, local residents were sold a story about the future development, says Fay: “We’re building a new city quarter, everyone is in this together.”
“Then six months later, we were told there was a demolition order,” he says. “Then started a running battle between the community and Dublin Corporation, as it was at the time.”
Fay says that people who live on Sheriff Street interpreted McRedmond’s comment about “completely rebuilding the Sheriff Street area” as meaning that their homes would be gone.
McRedmond said on Wednesday that this isn’t the case. He was referring to plans to improve public space in the area, he said.
“I’d hate to think that anyone would feel in any way insecure about their homes,” he says. “I don’t see anything that would in any way threaten people’s homes.”
To the north of Sheriff Street Lower, Ballymore has planning permission for offices and apartments on a massive parcel of state land owned by CIÉ.
It was first branded as the Connolly Quarter, with planning permission granted for 741 homes, which was later overturned in court.
Ballymore reapplied for planning permission and got it, with the current grant for office blocks, a hotel, and 187 build-to-rent apartments, and the project now called Dublin Arch.
A spokesperson for Ballymore said its masterplan for Dublin Arch also includes community spaces, and “knits and integrates the wider Sheriff Street area into the scheme with improved streets, pedestrian and cycle connections and direct links to Connolly rail station”.
The masterplan objectives dovetail well with the Dublin City Taskforce’s report, they said.
Fay recalls meetings in the late 1980s when the community centre was so packed that many people had to stand. “People suddenly realised, I’m being turfed out of my home,” he says.
An engineer’s report said that the flats were structurally sound, he says. But the minister at the time signed a demolition order.
Residents refused to leave their homes, says Fay. Some chained themselves to the railings outside the Dáil.
Eventually, Dublin Corporation bought vacant sites in Seville Place and elsewhere in the area, to rehouse those social tenants who wanted to stay living in the community.
The RTÉ archives capture the last of the demolition works in 1998.
Gardaí could do a lot more to clamp down on crime in Sheriff Street if they wanted to, says Fay. There are plenty of CCTV cameras but the Store Street Garda Station, which is very nearby, ignores the open drug dealing, he says.
“The Sheriff Street area and the Seville Place area have been a containment zone since the IFSC was built,” he says. “We are a 24/7 drug supermarket.”
“There is no guards, there is no policing,” says Fay.
Ultimately, he still thinks that crime and social issues could be used as an excuse to demolish the street, he says.
McRedmond says his comments shouldn’t be interpreted as meaning that anyone’s home is going to be demolished.
“What I’ve seen is some ideas for how they [Ballymore] can help renew the area, but it's more about the public space,” he says. “It's not about people’s homes as such.”
It is good to have open conversations about ways to improve the city centre, he says. There are many derelict and vacant properties in the north inner city, he said.
“We all want to see the derelict sites be built on or to be refurbished, whichever is appropriate, and ideally for housing, because that is what the need is,” he said.
He doesn’t think the new homes should be any one type of housing. “I’m very much in favour of mixed development, I’m not ideological,” he says.
He envisages mixed-use regeneration of the city centre, including a mix of homes, retail and offices. “Mixed-use, mixed type of housing, mixed sources of capital,” he says. “I think that is the best way to develop.”
McRedmond says he has visited places in the United Kingdom which he believes provide good examples of successful urban regeneration.
He cites examples of the London boroughs of Brixton and Hackney. “They’ve actually been popular and they have done well.”
He says there was extensive consultation in the redevelopment of working-class areas in London. “I think urban regeneration has gone pretty well in London,” says McRedmond.
Some of the public-private partnership schemes there “were very, very heavy consultation with local communities, indeed ongoing consultation with local communities”, he said.
For community leaders in the Sheriff Street area though, regeneration projects in London have long served as a warning rather than an aspiration.
Back in 2018, while plans for the CIÉ lands were still being worked out, Gerry Fay – then chair of the community association – said he had little hope that the needs of those living in the area would be taken into account.
He recalled seeing Ted Johns speak at Liberty Hall in the city centre years earlier, he said.
The grassroots activist was from the Isle of Dogs in London, and had spent years fighting for working-class communities to see gains from the construction around them and warned of fake promises and a future that never comes.
It had all come true, Fay said. “They always talk about tomorrow.”
Back on Sheriff Street on Thursday, kids played football on an astroturf pitch outside the youth centre.
Across Common Street to the west, a high stone wall – two or three storeys tall – was topped with a kind of mesh fence that makes it even higher.
On the other side of the wall, is the Custom House Harbour apartment complex, where apartments’ balconies overlook a waterfall that falls into a placid basin.
It is gated, with big signs warning the clampers will get you, and private security is watching via CCTV. An ad on Daft for a one-bed quotes €1,897 a month.
Can more be done to bring down cost-rental rents in Dublin?
“In the midst of a housing crisis, it is unacceptable that the apprenticeships … are being under-resourced,” says Unite regional officer James McCabe.
As many as 1,325 social homes in Dublin city are at an advanced stage, with planning granted – but now with no clear funding.
Councillors said that they feel the city was just used as the backdrop for a pre-election PR campaign.
