O’Connell Street, Dublin: Will new developments make it better or worse?
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/2023/08/12/oconnell-street-dublin-will-new-developments-make-it-better-or-worse/
It’s our national street. I hope it improves dramatically. I know in recent times r/Ireland Reddit has commented extensively on this.
by EssdubU
13 comments
Unless gentrification takes place in the area then it won’t be Improved.
And people are always against gentrification.
It’s such a bloody waste.
>Guiney says: “I’d like to see more guards and we’re hoping to get more. Nothing makes people feel safer than seeing a guard on the street… but similarly, we know that you can’t have a guard on every street 24 hours a day. We’re not a police state.”
Yes you can’t have a gardai on every fucking street. But you most certainly can have 4 of them on O’Connell st, a few more patrolling the boardwalk and the quays, a few more on Henry Street, and a few in Temple bar and Grafton street
All there 24/7.
It’s not a ridiculous proposal in any way.
Lots of council flats in the area. Doesn’t matter what they put in clearys
O’Connell Street should be a velodrome with sulkies instead of chariots, junkies can fight each other in gladitoral combat.
Clerys reopening should improve it a lot. The empty building beside the James Joyce statue and the Spire – used to be a cafe – is grim as fuck
Reduce the traffic, more pedestrian space with outdoor seating. Fewer bookies, pool halls and gold for cash places.
But needs 24/7 Garda presence on all sides and ends for months to eliminate the scourge of scobes. Literally need a cop on every corner like many other European cities. You see cops everywhere in touristy parts of London, Milan, Barcelona etc.
Can the government not just hire more Gardai? We have billions in corporate tax so we can easily afford it. I don’t understand their reluctance.
Quirkeys and the casinos are just a plague on the street. A quarter of the street being used for nothing useful.
The vacant lot up from Quirkeys is criminal. Whatever about all the other shite on the street, that there’s such a large, vacant lot on a capital cities main street is insane. A cpo should have been made on it years ago. At the very least make it a public area.
“Our national street?!” Talk about notions!
I’ve never heard *any* other country in the world describe the Main Street in a capital city as “our national street” – even Londoners wouldn’t dare say that about Regent Street or the Mall or something. Which street is even London’s
Main Street anyway?!
It’s questionable as to whether O’Connell Street is even Dublin’s Main Street. It’s just a wide avenue with no function that’s quite rundown once you look at it.
Dublin’s Main Street could easily be described as Dame Street, Grafton Street. In fact many visitors to the city assume the city centre is Stephen’s Green or College Green btw.
The reality of it is that unless the north inner city of Dublin improves, O’Connell’s Street will always reflect it. It lacks any reason to go there. It just an empty wide avenue with a collection of take aways and bus stops and for some reason all the retail is down one side street only – Henry St / Mary St and it’s very much limited to there, despite there being a whole load of potential retail streets, they’ve always all been relatively rundown and uninviting.
There’s a lot of nice Georgian and Victorian architecture in scattered around north inner city Dublin but it seems to have been in decline for a couple of centuries at this stage. It’s not recent and the council and its predecessors have failed to turn it around in all that time.
To turn it around you’d need to get a big investment. If you dropped the rates to very low, massively encouraged retail and restaurants etc to open it might kick start it, but that never happens and never really gets to the scale and critical mass it needs to self sustain as an area of activity in the city. It’s also way too rough, which frightens off businesses and would be footfall.
I was at the Savoy on Thursday and followed it with a meal in the 101. Enjoyed my night out but the whole area is depressing. I usually cross the Liffey and socialise on the Grafton street side. It just has a far nicer ambiance and visual appeal.
It’s surely not beyond the capabilities of the powers that be to come up with a plan and implement it? It’s actually not that bad in other parts of the north side of the Liffey. Around Capel Street and around the docks – but Talbot and O’Connell are just grim!
There was talk I remember years ago of moving the abbey theatre to the Carlton Cinema site. I think that’s a great idea. I’d move all the fast food joints to either a dedicated food hall on the street or to side streets and have museums, theatres and gallery’s and one or two shops like Easons on the street with the odd boutique cafe. Shop frontage and signage needs to blend in with the street in keeping with it’s importance. And have outdoor dining in the paved middle section. With parasols and patio heaters there’s no excuse why they can’t work even in Irish weather. It’s simply a lack of imagination and delivery.
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