With “5% policy”, council seeks to increase community and cultural spaces in the city

On Sunday afternoon, the cranes over Marshall Yards in the Docklands were motionless.

Just behind the East Road freight train yard, the nine apartment blocks in the development are at varying stages of completion.

Some of the seven-storey blocks appear finished, at least from the outside. The tallest, which climbs to 15 floors, is still skeletal at its top.

Down at the ground floor, a black hoarding promised that this sizable project of 554 flats, being developed by Eagle Street Partners, was “coming soon”.

Eagle Street’s website says this would be in the first quarter of 2026. As a part of these works, they are due to deliver space for exhibitions.

Taking up about five percent of the development as a whole, this space and use is there because of relatively recent Dublin City Council policy brought in to try to reverse the decline of community and cultural spaces.

The policy, brought in as part of the 2022 to 2028 city development plan,  applies to developments bigger than 10,000 sqm.

Marshall Yards is being seen as a pilot for the effective implementation of the policy, said Social Democrats Councillor Cat O’Driscoll said on Friday. “They are eager to make it work.”

A few councillors had dropped down to visit the site recently, she said. “And we’re eager for this to be a best practice case study that we can point to for other developers.”

Overall, developers have had very mixed feelings towards this scheme, said Labour Councillor Darragh Moriarty on Tuesday. “But we’ve gone from the concept and theory in the previous council term to trying to embed this, and implement it.”

A spectrum of interest

Attitudes among developers towards the five percent scheme have gradually shifted in the last year and a half, says Ray Yeates, the city arts officer.

In November 2023, Yeates met informally with a group of about 20 developers.

“It was just how do developers feel about it, what happens, and how would it land?” he said, on Friday.

He just wanted to get a sense of the mood as the council was in the early stages of handling planning applications that had to take the policy into account, he said.

The initial response among developers was negative, Yeates said at a 10 February meeting of the Arts and Culture Advisory Group – which falls under the council’s arts committee – according to the minutes.

The policy was viewed by developers as reducing their return on their development, and damaging to both their operating income and their yield, he said at the meeting.

The main problem recounted by developers was that in an economic model where 100 percent of the site must make a return on the investment, how would that five percent work? Yeates said on Friday.

“And it isn’t just for arts organisations, but it’s for creative and community and cultural organisations,” he said. “And when they take up that five percent, will they be able to pay on site?”

Feelings, however, slowly thawed. Some developers have since used the developer toolkit created by the Arts Office to guide them through the process, he said at the February meeting.

Since November, the position of developers towards the scheme has become more mixed, he said. No longer uniformly against.

But, Yeates stressed, one of the issues that remains is that the council isn’t responsible for implementing the policy. That is the responsibility of the developers, he said.

This has led to the delivery of spaces that developers earmark for performances and exhibitions, or artist studios, but which are only used on a handful of occasions or left entirely empty.

But that appears to be changing with the introduction of the toolkit, Yeates said on Friday. “Part of the toolkit is to put a consultant on your staff that has the experience to connect the developer to the artistic community.”

Or at least, that is how it should be done in theory, he says. “In practice, the developer could ignore it, and just say: there’s your five percent, and it could end up empty.”

The council is limited in its ability to deal with these issues, he says. “Then, will there be enforcement? It’s far too late if it’s enforcement. If you’ve reached that stage, everybody has failed, because there should be tenants and uses built into the developer strategy.”

A broad remit

The council’s Arts Office is seeing a wide range of responses to the five percent scheme, from the committed to the completely averse, said Yeates, during a second update to the arts committee on 17 February.

What the council is looking at now is being a catalyst for developers, to help and support them, he said, “but not stepping in to take on the responsibility of the private sector in delivering spaces in developments, some of which are highly profitable”.

The Arts Office has been meeting with two to three developers a month over the past two years, he said. “Fifty percent of all planning applications do not proceed.”

Some are at the pre-planning stage, he said, but the Eagle Street development on East Road is the first one to be on site.

The implementation of the policy is going to be messy, said Moriarty, the Labour councillor, and arts committee chair, on Tuesday.

“It’s a very broad remit. Within that five percent, you’ve got community included, you’ve got arts and culture included. Defining what that is is difficult,” he said.

One of Moriarty’s queries at the Arts and Culture Advisory Group meeting was whether the Arts Office would envisage any legal action from developers who cannot make the five percent work or didn’t find it viable.

It’s a possibility, Yeates said.

It’s going to take a long time to bed-down, but the positive is that a mix of groups – the Arts Office, the Planning Department, the private sector – are all engaging, said Moriarty on  Tuesday.

“You’re getting different parts of the system to talk with each other, troubleshooting,” he said.