I assume the answer is a mixture of DCC being incompetent and our vast amount of red tape in planning.
And a lot of them are vanity projects
Red tape & forms just to fill out other forms.
Because no matter what they try do we just get complainers. So it loses support
Because they don’t especially care about doing anything to make the city good to live in. Anything that’s for the benefit of Dubliners rather than Dublin City Council is an annoyance.
There is a huge, huge, huge disconnect between the unelected executive and the elected councillors, and unfortunately our system gives ridiculous amounts of power to the former over the latter.
When the current city manager of DCC, Owen Keegan, was the Dun Laoghaire manager, absolutely nothing got done except hugely unpopular vanity projects. Since he moved to DCC and we got a new manager in the early 2010s, Dun Laoghaire has been absolutely transformed for the better. Just to give one very recent and topical example, around the time that DCC were removing public bins, refusing to put in public toilets and fencing off public areas like Portobello Square to deal with COVID crowds, Dun Laoghaire was installing public toilets and giant wheelie bins literally all over the town from Sandycove to Monkstown, and ensuring that all of the different public areas were well-enough served to encourage people to fan out across the town as opposed to congregating in one or two viable areas. They built a new public plaza (Myrtle Square), put in public seating and tables all over the place, etc. As a result, Dun Laoghaire didn’t have anything like the kind of trouble that Dublin City did, despite drawing the usual flocks of people during that epic July heatwave right in the middle of the Delta scare.
Almost immediately after Keegan moved to DCC, things started to change for the better here, honestly. It started with paving over the DART line near Teddys and further up near the Pavillion to put in public seating, public bathrooms installed in the park and at the pier, extra bins installed all over the place, etc etc etc.
In short, when Keegan was our manager, Dun Laoghaire, much like Dublin City Centre now, had a distinct air of “if you’re not travelling to Dun Laoghaire to be a paying customer of a private business, we don’t want you here and would prefer if you just fucked off altogether”. It’s hard not to correlate that attitude with his leadership – in fact I’m fairly sure that when queried about the outdoor summer and how that clashed with the lack of provisioning in the city centre last year, one of his colleagues very bluntly stated that they were preparing the city from a business friendly point of view and *not* a people friendly one.
The fact that people friendly and business friendly are ultimately symbiotic seems to be lost on these people. Make a place nice for people to hang out in and they’re more likely to stick around and actually drop in to a business for food or drink. Make a place horrible for people to hang out in, and businesses suffer because people just choose to go somewhere else entirely.
Dublin City is seen as a place to drive in and out of for work and shopping. The majority of the people who live there are poor and what they think or want doesn’t matter because the ruling class want to have their big house in the suburbs, and nice big wide roads to drive in and out everyday. Fuck everyone else.
Why is this entire country so bad at getting big projects over the line?
Because in gov/councils there’s little incentive or initiative. Just do your job, get through the day and who care if it happens in the next decade
I don’t think this is specifically a DCC problem.
Smell of piss, stabbings, scrotes running wild, murders on main streets but property prices go only up – why bother doing anything at all?
Red tape, brown envelopes and incompetent staff.
It’s Ireland.
Why is Dublin city council so bad at getting big projects over the line?
One freezing morning in April 2013, Naoise Ó Muirí, then lord mayor of Dublin, stood in Parnell Square and proudly welcomed “bold and visionary” plans for a new cultural quarter.
He said the project would be a “catalyst for regeneration” of the north inner city, by developing one of the capital’s “finest” Georgian squares. At the plan’s centre was a library inside six restored Georgian houses, bordering a new public plaza. It would take three years to complete.
Almost a decade on, Parnell Square looks exactly the same as it did that day. Construction has not started; the regeneration has not begun. Dublin city council last week said that delivery of the project continued apace and it hopes the library will be “complete by 2027”, or 14 years after the project was unveiled. The future of the plaza is uncertain.
“I never thought it would take this long,” Ó Muirí said. “A three to five-year window seemed plenty of time. I didn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be delivered. I have a personal interest in this and the pace is incredibly frustrating.”
Ó Muirí believes directly elected mayors for Dublin would help to speed up large projects but only if they were given the power to raise funds and oversee delivery. “The mayor of London has that power,” he said.
Asked to name large projects that have been delivered in Dublin over the past two decades, council officials cite the Liffey boardwalk extension in 2005, the Port Tunnel in 2006, and Grand Canal Square in 2007. They also point to the recent partial or full pedestrianisation of Anne Street South, Dame Court and Drury Street as well as Ryder’s Row.
Dubliners, however, are used to ambitious plans being unveiled before being delayed, scaled down or dropped. The paralysis is frustrating given the scale of change in European cities such as Barcelona and Paris — both with elected mayors — which have upgraded cycling networks and pedestrian zones.
Dublin city council is full of arrogant misogynistic pricks. And they are all thick as shot too.
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Paywalled.
I assume the answer is a mixture of DCC being incompetent and our vast amount of red tape in planning.
And a lot of them are vanity projects
Red tape & forms just to fill out other forms.
Because no matter what they try do we just get complainers. So it loses support
Because they don’t especially care about doing anything to make the city good to live in. Anything that’s for the benefit of Dubliners rather than Dublin City Council is an annoyance.
There is a huge, huge, huge disconnect between the unelected executive and the elected councillors, and unfortunately our system gives ridiculous amounts of power to the former over the latter.
When the current city manager of DCC, Owen Keegan, was the Dun Laoghaire manager, absolutely nothing got done except hugely unpopular vanity projects. Since he moved to DCC and we got a new manager in the early 2010s, Dun Laoghaire has been absolutely transformed for the better. Just to give one very recent and topical example, around the time that DCC were removing public bins, refusing to put in public toilets and fencing off public areas like Portobello Square to deal with COVID crowds, Dun Laoghaire was installing public toilets and giant wheelie bins literally all over the town from Sandycove to Monkstown, and ensuring that all of the different public areas were well-enough served to encourage people to fan out across the town as opposed to congregating in one or two viable areas. They built a new public plaza (Myrtle Square), put in public seating and tables all over the place, etc. As a result, Dun Laoghaire didn’t have anything like the kind of trouble that Dublin City did, despite drawing the usual flocks of people during that epic July heatwave right in the middle of the Delta scare.
Almost immediately after Keegan moved to DCC, things started to change for the better here, honestly. It started with paving over the DART line near Teddys and further up near the Pavillion to put in public seating, public bathrooms installed in the park and at the pier, extra bins installed all over the place, etc etc etc.
In short, when Keegan was our manager, Dun Laoghaire, much like Dublin City Centre now, had a distinct air of “if you’re not travelling to Dun Laoghaire to be a paying customer of a private business, we don’t want you here and would prefer if you just fucked off altogether”. It’s hard not to correlate that attitude with his leadership – in fact I’m fairly sure that when queried about the outdoor summer and how that clashed with the lack of provisioning in the city centre last year, one of his colleagues very bluntly stated that they were preparing the city from a business friendly point of view and *not* a people friendly one.
The fact that people friendly and business friendly are ultimately symbiotic seems to be lost on these people. Make a place nice for people to hang out in and they’re more likely to stick around and actually drop in to a business for food or drink. Make a place horrible for people to hang out in, and businesses suffer because people just choose to go somewhere else entirely.
Dublin City is seen as a place to drive in and out of for work and shopping. The majority of the people who live there are poor and what they think or want doesn’t matter because the ruling class want to have their big house in the suburbs, and nice big wide roads to drive in and out everyday. Fuck everyone else.
Why is this entire country so bad at getting big projects over the line?
Because in gov/councils there’s little incentive or initiative. Just do your job, get through the day and who care if it happens in the next decade
I don’t think this is specifically a DCC problem.
Smell of piss, stabbings, scrotes running wild, murders on main streets but property prices go only up – why bother doing anything at all?
Red tape, brown envelopes and incompetent staff.
It’s Ireland.
Why is Dublin city council so bad at getting big projects over the line?
One freezing morning in April 2013, Naoise Ó Muirí, then lord mayor of Dublin, stood in Parnell Square and proudly welcomed “bold and visionary” plans for a new cultural quarter.
He said the project would be a “catalyst for regeneration” of the north inner city, by developing one of the capital’s “finest” Georgian squares. At the plan’s centre was a library inside six restored Georgian houses, bordering a new public plaza. It would take three years to complete.
Almost a decade on, Parnell Square looks exactly the same as it did that day. Construction has not started; the regeneration has not begun. Dublin city council last week said that delivery of the project continued apace and it hopes the library will be “complete by 2027”, or 14 years after the project was unveiled. The future of the plaza is uncertain.
“I never thought it would take this long,” Ó Muirí said. “A three to five-year window seemed plenty of time. I didn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be delivered. I have a personal interest in this and the pace is incredibly frustrating.”
Ó Muirí believes directly elected mayors for Dublin would help to speed up large projects but only if they were given the power to raise funds and oversee delivery. “The mayor of London has that power,” he said.
Asked to name large projects that have been delivered in Dublin over the past two decades, council officials cite the Liffey boardwalk extension in 2005, the Port Tunnel in 2006, and Grand Canal Square in 2007. They also point to the recent partial or full pedestrianisation of Anne Street South, Dame Court and Drury Street as well as Ryder’s Row.
Dubliners, however, are used to ambitious plans being unveiled before being delayed, scaled down or dropped. The paralysis is frustrating given the scale of change in European cities such as Barcelona and Paris — both with elected mayors — which have upgraded cycling networks and pedestrian zones.
Dublin city council is full of arrogant misogynistic pricks. And they are all thick as shot too.