Vacancy Watch: Ten empty old flats near Phoenix Park

A photo from around 1968 shows Leo Casey among 15 children, smiling and standing up against a brick wall. 

Casey, on the far left in a pair of shorts and a dark knitted vest over a white shirt, was the son of a Phoenix Park gate keeper. 

He lived in the gate lodge by the North Circular Road entrance. It was an interesting place to grow up with the zoo nearby, he says.

In the morning, you’d wake to the grunts of lions, the howls of baboons, or the sight of a runaway racoon, he says. “At 11pm, the gates were closed by my father, and you were inside the park. So until 7am the following morning, you had the park to yourself.”

The other kids in the photograph were his neighbours. They lived in a series of terraced flats on the North Road, beside the An Garda Síochána’s headquarters in the Phoenix Park depot.

These flats were married quarters, occupied by members of An Garda Síochána and their families.

Originally used as accommodation for the Royal Irish Constabulary, the quarters date back to the late 19th century. 

They are a long, two-storey red brick building that has been divided into 12 flats: six on the ground floor and six on the first.

Although a protected structure, the building has steadily fallen into disuse. Doors and windows are boarded up. 

The wooden canopy, painted aqua green, covering the first floor balconies, is rotting and peeling. Window frames are rotting and falling apart in places.

As with married quarters elsewhere in the city – such as those outside the grounds of Cathal Brugha Barracks in Rathmines, which housed members of the Defence Forces and their families – the number of functional flats in this building has shrunk as the property ages.

Of the 12 flats, only two are occupied, a Garda spokesperson said on Tuesday. 

The Office of Public Works years ago said figuring out what to do with this terrace was on its agenda, but an OPW spokesperson has not answered queries sent Friday about progress on these improvements.

The 19th century as told by Tumblr

The Royal Irish Constabulary’s headquarters, known as the Phoenix Park depot, was built in 1842 for an estimated cost of £10,000, according to the Garda Síochána website.

At that time, the depot was composed of three “barrack-looking buildings”, according to Francis Bond Head, an engineer who was lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, in his 1852 travelogue A Busy Fortnight in Ireland.

The long northern front of the depot had a clock at the centre of the building, and consisted of an officers’ quarters and mess room, infantry dormitories and a commandant’s quarter, Head said.

Both the east and west wings were given over to accommodation for infantry and cavalry, with the latter also receiving stables, according to Head.

But the married quarters weren’t a part of that original building when work was completed in November 1842, says Jim Herlihy, a retired Garda Síochána and a co-founder of the An Garda Síochána Historical Society. 

“There were some additions to the buildings. Around 1865, the officers quarters were added, and then the infirmary,” he says.

The Married Quarters, later Garda Terrace, were developed in the 1880s, and their construction became a subject of debate in the House of Commons in March 1886, according UK Parliament records, which are archived on the Phoenix Park’s Tumblr page.

That year, the Irish nationalist member of parliament, Tim Healy said that the proposed accommodation for married police officers would cost between an estimated £3,000 and £4,000, according to parliamentary records archived on the Tumblr page.

Healy took issue with this new development, as about a quarter of the Phoenix Park had already been “purloined” from the public for the purpose of official residences, he said.

But there wasn’t evidence that the public had had access to this area since the park was purchased by the crown in the mid-17th century, said Henry Hartley Fowler, the UK’s Secretary to the Treasury. 

The proposed married constables’ quarters would cover only an acre and a half, he said, “thus leaving more than 1,330 acres open to the public”.

Henry refused to suspend this project. A contract for it had already been entered into, and the foundations prepared, he said.

These barracks were also deemed a necessity by the Constabulary Department, with the land chosen by the Treasury as there was no other site available, he said.

Changeover

The RIC depot was handed over to An Garda Síochána in 1923, and used as both a headquarters and training centre, according to the Garda website.

Casey, who was born in 1959, says during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, a lot of gardaí posted in the depot were coming from the countryside. “A number of them were the drivers for the government ministers, driving the black Mercedes.”

Often, those were the gardaí who were given accommodation in the building, renamed Garda Terrace, he says. “The people there would’ve been there relatively long-term.”

It was great to be a child living in the area with those families, he says. “There were loadsa friends and we played football in the yard in front of the terrace, or a little bit further out in the park.”

The flats in the terrace were modestly sized, he says. “It was families with four, five kids. It was pretty crowded.”

It also felt like quite a strange building, because it was faced away from the park and the North Road, he says. 

“I always felt sad. In any other circumstances, I think the houses would’ve been turned around with the front door facing onto the People’s Gardens,” he says.

Future potential

Although two of the properties in Garda Terrace are still occupied, according to the Garda spokesperson, the rest are vacant.

From below the grassy slope that leads up to North Road from the park, the chimneys of the quarters can be glimpsed.

There are 12 in total, eight of which are secured in place with small planks of wood that have been wrapped in green gauze.

None of the flats are listed on Dublin City Council’s derelict sites register. The terrace doesn’t show too many signs of deterioration externally.

Windows looking out onto the park were boarded up and blacked out. On the first floor, somebody had written the word “help” on its dusty surface.

The main entrance to the terrace is in a shaded car park behind the eastern wing of the depot. It has a well-kept lawn, with some potted plants growing in an old wheelbarrow next to a garden shed.

Nobody in the two visibly occupied flats was around. But the area was maintained, with the windowsills of the boarded-up flats decorated with potted plants.

The front doors of vacant units had only been blocked up recently. Images from Google Street View dated July 2022 show those entrances without boards.

An Garda Síochána has been in ongoing discussions with the OPW about the future of the site, “for operational requirements”, the Garda spokesperson said.

The OPW has previously highlighted the need to find a future for Garda Terrace.

In its conservation management plan for the Phoenix Park, published in September 2011, the OPW set out an objective to study a number of key buildings in the park, assess their conditions and consider appropriate new or alternative uses for them.

Garda Terrace was listed among these buildings, which also included the Magazine Fort and the Ordinance Survey complex.

But while the OPW said studies of, and works on, these buildings were a short- to medium-term priority, or tasks to be done within a five to 10-year period, there has been no evidence that progress on revitalising Garda Terrace has been made since 2011.

Nor did a spokesperson for the OPW give any updates when asked if plans to improve the terrace had advanced.

Casey isn’t sure the terrace would be suitable for housing families any longer, however, he says. “I do think, if the brick structures could be maintained and used for other purposes, it would be really good,” he said.