Why has some of the greenery in city planters been left to wither?

On Wednesday morning, Capel Street was patched with greenery. 

Midway along, lavender ladies blossomed around a small tree with crispening leaves and spilled through the wooden fencing. 

But at the top of the street on Ryder’s Row, the landscape changes. The plants in the small zebra planters that mark off the bike lane are withered and brown.

Further into town, outside the Gate Theatre on Cavendish Row, the shrubs in similar zebra planters lining the cycle lane are also decaying. 

Green Party Councillor Janet Horner says she thinks the reason for the difference is down to who is in charge of maintaining the greenery. 

On Capel Street, it’s the council’s parks department, she says, by phone on Thursday. 

Meanwhile, the traffic department is responsible for the small planters that line Ryder’s Row and Cavendish Row, says Horner.

Horner asked the council to spruce up the planters in March. She raised it in July too, and again at the full Dublin City Council monthly meeting last Monday. 

Independent Councillor Mannix Flynn submitted questions in March too, including asking about the planters. 

Brendan O’Brien, the council’s traffic manager, said at Monday’s meeting that the traffic department had tried to tender for a contractor to address “the long-running planter saga” in the north inner-city. 

It ran a tender process and appointed a preferred bidder, he said. But then the company turned down the work, said O’Brien. 

The council will have to go out to tender again, he said. “It's left us having to go back around again.” 

The council is looking at temporary measures, he says. 

“It's not just a failure of procurement, it's that having gone through the whole process, the contractor that we had appointed didn’t take it up,” says O’Brien. 

Horner said she is surprised that the council doesn’t have staff that could just care for the planters or contractors for small jobs such as this. 

“It just seems insane to me that you have to go out to tender for such a small task,” she says. 

She thought that individual tenders were usually for larger projects, she says. “It's a tiny job, get a bag of soil, fill up the planters and put some plants in them.”

Could staff from the parks department help colleagues in traffic, given the issues with tendering? she asked.

Responsibility for planters on the city streets is split between three separate council units – traffic, active travel, and parks – which don’t always work together, she says. 

DublinTown, the business association, also provides some planters on the city streets, says Horner. 

Still, “what should be an incredibly simple task is made far too complicated, expensive and cumbersome, because of the silos in operation in Dublin City Council,” says Horner.