Rundale

by Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn, with assistance from Kathleen Stokes and Tommy Gavin

Dublin City’s Development Plan pitches the idea that within the next ten years Dublin will have an established international reputation as a city region that is one of Europe’s most sustainable, dynamic, and resourceful cities. Through the shared vision of its citizens and civic leaders, Dublin (the plan suggests) will be a beautiful, compact city, with a distinctive character and vibrant culture, and a diverse, green, and innovative economy. 

It’s tempting to dismiss the gap between this effusive forecast and what it’s currently like to live, work, or move around Dublin as a defining feature of most grand plan statements about cities. However, the gap is particularly acute and a bit galling at the minute. Dublin’s housing system is​​ dysfunctional for most people, with the city regularly taking a podium position as one of the worst cities in the world to move to, rent or buy property in. Homelessness is at a record peak. The cost of living is crippling. Public transport is expensive.

In some senses, Dublin is thought of as being too full – with inadequate housing, healthcare, and public services for those who are here (with the problem being the lack of adequate and affordable housing, healthcare, and public services, despite what some have tried to suggest about who should or shouldn’t be here). At the same time, there is a growing sense that Dublin is also too empty. Most recently, this has been coming up in discussion around commercial property markets, and specifically offices, with rising vacancy rates. But warnings are also being sounded about the decimation of Dublin’s cultural spaces, with artist spaces and low or no-profit social and non-profit spaces being squeezed out of existence by the seemingly relentless churn of the city’s property market, and the crowding out of housing and arts spaces by hotel developments.

The city as an expensive tourist attraction, rather than a place where people can comfortably live

The contrast between Dublin as both crowded and emptied raises the question of who or what the city is for, and we think that there’s a clear and widening gap between the city as an expensive tourist attraction rather than a place where people can comfortably live. ‘DoDublin’ is the bus tour company run by Dublin Bus, and the name is apt – as a tourist destination, Dublin gets ‘done’, ticked off of the to-do list. Tourism blogs suggest that Dublin is a 3-4 day destination ‘if you’d like to slow things down’ or that 2 days is ‘arguably the perfect amount of time’.

It’s also worth noting that Dublin is one of the most expensive cities in Europe to visit (the UK PostOffice’s 2023 City Costs Barometer ranked Dublin as fourth most expensive, after Amsterdam, Venice, and Paris). Fáilte Ireland’s Regional Development Strategy for Dublin (2023-2028) notes that ‘Dublin has traditionally been very dependent on international visitors, and typically these visitors either come for a city break or stay in Dublin as a “top or tail” to a longer trip to Ireland’. The Regional Tourism Development Strategy suggests that tourism is worth over €2bn annually and supports about 70,000 jobs (although, we should note, many of these jobs are poorly paid and Fáilte Ireland’s own research notes that many workers in the hospitality sector experience exploitation).

Overall, this argument that tourism contributes to the economy and local employment tends to overshadow discussion of tourism’s costs. We think this is an important factor in understanding what Dublin is and what it might become. Indeed, 47% of respondents to Dublin City Council’s Attitude to Tourism in Dublin Survey reported experiencing problems caused by tourism in the city (such as crowding, cost of living, housing prices, problems with public cleanliness/waste, and depopulation of the city centre). Some of these problems reflect a narrow view of tourism’s effects – who amongst us hasn’t been resentfully wedged on to a Dublin Bus with a hoard of language students during the summer months? But the costs associated with tourism are also wider and more diffuse, particularly so when we consider its environmental impacts and effects on housing and urban space.

Tourism is tied up in the climate crisis, and the carbon footprint of global tourism is big and expanding; a 2018 study in Nature Climate Change estimated that the sector accounted for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with the majority of this footprint being exerted by and in high-income countries through transport, shopping, and food. While Fáilte Ireland’s Regional Development Strategy for Dublin is at pains to emphasise the organisation’s commitment to sustainability, climate action and biodiversity, reducing the carbon footprint of Dublin’s tourism industry is challenging when almost 95% of passengers arriving in Ireland do so by air. The push for continuous growth in tourist numbers is at odds with sustainability commitments and is a circle that can’t really be squared.

We see tourism as negatively affecting housing supply in two key ways. Firstly, housing units (houses, apartments, and rooms) that could be homes are converted into tourist accommodation through short-term rental platforms like Airbnb. It’s important to note that of course not all short-term rental listings do this, and that there’s a big difference between renting out your home for a few nights over the Paddy’s Day weekend and running an Airbnb empire. This is something that the state’s Planning and Development (amendment) Regulations 2019 tries to get at by placing a cumulative 90 day per calendar year limit on residents letting out their home on a short-term basis without needing to apply for planning permission.

The latest data collected by Inside Airbnb, a data and advocacy project addressing Airbnb’s impact on residential communities, suggest that almost half of all Airbnb listings in Dublin were entire homes/apartments (4,666 of 9,020). Of these entire homes/apartments, over 28% were listed as available for more than 90 days of the year, and almost 17% (787) were listed as available for more than 183 days of the year (which is the number used for tax residency). Many of these properties are located between the canals. Their use as Airbnb listings echoes with Dublin residents’ concerns about the depopulation of the city centre.

Secondly, rampant hotel development is crowding out other types of development in Dublin. Again, hotels don’t necessarily automatically impact on housing supply and the decision to build housing or a hotel on a given site is not always straightforward. However, there is an opportunity cost when urban space is regularly used for any one type of development over another. Fáilte Ireland’s Regional Development Strategy for Dublin (2023-2028) notes that there are 158 hotels in Dublin, whose 22,311 rooms make up over 90% of available units in tourist accommodation (e.g. hotels, hostels, B&Bs, etc.). According to Fáilte Ireland, up to 4,000 new hotel rooms are to be added to this stock by the end of 2024. Media reports have questioned whether Dublin’s cultural soul is being lost in the rush to build hotels and whether this is too many or too few rooms. Meanwhile, real estate brokerage firms like CBRE have described hotel trading performance as ‘exceptional’. 

We think that the balance has been skewed toward hotel development in Dublin for some time, and this is making the city hard to live in. Those in favour of hotel development often argue that hotels provide local employment and that tourism contributes to the city’s economy. This might be true, but there’s a question of balancing interests. City centre land that could be used for housing is being used to build hotels, and this is reshaping the city in harmful ways.

Redoing Dublin – and what we can do to further this

Despite our frustrations, we do have hopes for the city, and we think that there’s good potential to connect up struggles in Dublin and elsewhere. Firstly, we know that we’re not alone in feeling that something must and can done at this critical juncture in the struggle for the city to come. Dubliners are annoyed about the stranglehold that property investment and development has on our city, and we’ve seen this in campaigns to fight for and win iconic Dublin sites like the Cobblestone and Chapters.

While these types of campaigns can sometimes seem hyper-local or very specific, we think that they should be seen as sites to link up as part of a longer-term struggle for our city. We’d like to think that Rundale can be one of a number of important resources for sustaining struggle, and we take inspiration from the amazing work of other independent media projects like The Dublin Inquirer, who pay attention to what’s happening in the city, and the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU Ireland), who are organising in our communities.

Secondly, and less locally, Dublin’s far from the only city where it might be worth rebalancing between the money that tourism brings and the costs that this has for residents’ quality of life. The city of Amsterdam’s Visitors Economy Vision 2035 campaign, for example, has the specific intention of addressing the negative effects that tourism has for residents of the city, and notes that ‘our hospitality can longer be at the detriment of our inhabitant’s quality of life and mobility’. This is a global issue, but it’s notable that Dublin has not been part of a wider movement of European cities problematising the connections between unsustainable growth-focused tourism and quality of life, inflated house prices, creaking transport networks, and noise, air, and environmental pollution.

We think that there’s scope for joining up with some of these municipal struggles elsewhere, and centring touristification as a campaign issue for international alliances like the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City. It’s also worth noting that touristification has potential to be a cross-cutting issue for political organising around socially and environmentally sustainable jobs, housing, and communities.