Dublin City Council to spend €3.8 million to rejuvenate city centre
Kenneth Fox
Dublin City Council is to spend €3.8 million on a dedicated unit for the “rejuvenation” of the city centre in response to riots over two years ago that "deeply affected the city".
As the Irish Examiner reports, the local authority has tendered a four-year contract for a professional services firm tasked with establishing a dedicated project management unit and special purpose vehicle.
Dublin’s north inner city has been plagued by petty crime and allegedly unsafe streets for several years.
These issues came to a head after thousands rioted on O’Connell St in the wake of the stabbing of a five-year-old schoolgirl in the area on November 23rd, 2023.
The city council's tender documents for the contract note that the riots, which resulted in property damage costing in the region of €20m, had “deeply affected the city”.
It noted that in the aftermath, a city co-ordination office had been set up within the local authority with the “unified goal” of making Dublin a “more vibrant, safe, and appealing city”.
In order to achieve that aim, a group of stakeholders — including gardaí, the National Transport Authority, Fáilte Ireland, and the HSE — were brought together to form an action group to identify the “key issues” which had “negatively impacted Dublin’s city centre”.
The group identified three action areas: Safety, movement and transport, and the "public realm".
The local authority stated that it had conducted research on best practices for achieving similar urban rehabilitation outcomes, both domestically and abroad, including Limerick Twenty Thirty and the Greater London Authority.
The three overriding goals of the project are to increase the number of people living in Dublin’s city centre, to have streets that “look cleaner and feel safer”, and to create a “healthy, vibrant, always-on city that respects its heritage”, the authority said.
To that end, 10 specific targets have been set, which will be the broad responsibility of the new dedicated unit.
