Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I went on an interesting walk on Sunday. I would not say it was an historical walk but rather quite current. I walked around the Dublin docklands area, looking at the development and destruction, as I define it, of what was a vibrant populated area that gave employment to a local community and where local inner-city people grew up and lived. One of the most shocking things I saw was "the Berlin wall", as it is colloquially known, which is an old wall behind Amiens Street that divides the people of Sheriff Street from those who live in these €350,000-plus apartments. I was given a list of what it costs to rent there and it is astronomical. It costs more than €3,500 a month for a three-bedroom property and €2,800 a month for a two-bedroom property. The wall reminded me of the peace wall in Ardoyne that divides the loyalist side of the community from the republican side. On top of the wall in the docklands, there is a wire net, probably the length of the panes of glasses above us in the Gallery, that prevents people from the Sheriff Street side flinging objects over the wall at the people on the posh side. It is a statement of the class divide that has been created, maintained and stabilised in what used to be the hardworking local community that lived and worked by the docks.

The Bill reminds me somewhat of Groundhog Day or the popular definition of insanity, where one tries to do something again in the very same way while expecting a different result. It is a Fianna Fáil solution to a Fianna Fáil problem because it was the party that established the original Dublin Docklands Development Authority, DDDA, and allowed hectares of public land be sold off cheaply to developers like Johnny Ronan, who is a contributor to Fianna Fáil's coffers, and others, whom we bailed out through the National Asset Management Agency over the exorbitant loans and expenditure that were given to them to plough into the area. Even though this is dressed up as being about renewal, economic and social regeneration and improvements in the physical environment, it is actually repeating the development-led possibilities in areas where, as there is a bit of public land, the developers can go for it.

Only a small community gain results from those developments around the docks. Where a gain exists, it was hard fought for by the local communities, not least women who occupied spaces to say they wanted social housing to be put there instead. It is interesting to see it at first hand because one might pass through it on the Luas and think there are many modern flats but, in fact, there is a legacy and history of bad planning and one-sided economic development that completely ignored the local community.

I listen to the former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, on the radio quite frequently because of Brexit. He was a Deputy in the area and the leader of the Fianna Fáil party at the time that it established the DDDA in 1997. All the local community got from that, however, was 390 social housing units out of a predicted 2,200 units, which was a real disaster for the local community. Furthermore, the International Financial Services Centre, IFSC, which was supposed to be the creator of jobs for the area, employs hardly anybody from the area. Of the tens of thousands of companies that are located there, many of them are just brass-plated companies which nobody works for but which are located there to avail of our low corporation tax and so on.

The legislation before us also reminds me of what is happening to an area where I used to live, namely, the Liberties, which is close to my heart. It is a terrible travesty to see the oldest, most historic and once vibrant community with many marketplaces, such as the Iveagh Market, being destroyed by developer-led policies that are being repeated. There are apartotels and student accommodation coming out of our ears, which uproots local communities who cannot afford to continue to live in the area and who are being swallowed up by all this development. While Dublin's inner city has seen a rush of planning applications and fast-tracking of planning systems, it has been passed by by elected representatives and any meaningful engagement by the local communities, which is a real shame. The sole interest is profit and the needs of the local community and the environment for the vibrancy and existence of our city are ignored. What Fianna Fáíl proposes will become a repeat of the past because of its connection with developers and builders. This will be a developer-led policy rather than a community-led policy. Unless there is development around the city that is about the people first, we will destroy what was once a beautiful and vibrant city, which is the direction in which Dublin is heading. I will reject this plan because it is not what is needed, especially in a part of the city that has suffered tremendous vandalism by the wealthy.

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