‘Ambitious’ plan to turn derelict buildings into homes for key Dublin workers
Dublin City Council has agreed to launch a €114 million urban rejuvenation project to tackle long-standing dereliction and vacancy.
This will initially focus on Middle Abbey Street, North Frederick Street and surrounding areas, with the hope of bringing new life to the city centre. The rejuvenation project aims to transform derelict, vacant, and underused buildings by turning them into new cost-rental homes for key workers, as well as new commercial, retail, or mixed-use spaces.
These changes will be supported by public realm upgrades and street activation measures to create a more vibrant and welcoming environment. A core tenet of this project is to demonstrate a new model for stimulating Dublin that can be scaled up citywide. This has been developed by an Urban Redevelopment Working Group, which consulted with more than 100 stakeholders across the Council.
Chair of the working group, Social Democrats Councillor Cian Farrell, spoke about meeting with state agencies, approved housing bodies, developers, financiers and industry experts over the past five months to develop these plans. “This gave us the building blocks for this regeneration framework to scale throughout the city,” he said.
The pilot project has a three year implementation plan that designed for to take things from initial groundwork to completed by projects by 2028. This timeline hopes to provide accountability and urgency, proving that visible change can happen over a short period of time and lay the foundations for long-term rejuvenation.
Speaking about the Derelicts Site Review, Cllr Farrell said together they have come up with recommendations to reduce dereliction and vacancy across Dublin. This includes a zero-tolerance approach and correcting past mistakes of the Council being “too lenient” with owners of vacant properties.
"This pilot is designed as the antidote: a simple, accountable, proactive, and collaborative model that moves at pace. By proving that Dublin City Council can govern boldly and deliver quickly - while staying compliant, transparent, and collaborative - the pilot will rebuild confidence in the public sector’s ability to drive urban rejuvenation and beyond," the project's report states.
Other recommendations include expanding the Derelict Site Unit from its current team of three and giving them more resources. Cllr Farrell cited the corresponding team in Limerick as having approximately a dozen people on their staff despite being significantly smaller than Dublin.
Cllr Farrell also highlighted the importance of encouraging existing council employees to investigate, report, and identify derelict sites. He said the overall goal is “to regenerate Dublin street by street.”
Various councillors praised Cllr Farrell for taking such firm initiative in helping develop this project and stressed the importance of bringing people back to live and work in the city centre. With a potential regeneration fund of €114 million, councillors highlighted this as a truly ambitious and creative new approach to a long-standing housing issue.
“There’s no one solution to the housing crisis, but this report is innovative, collaborative, and action orientated,” Social Democrats Cllr Aishling Silke said. “It’s one that is environmentally friendly and going to ensure the preservation of buildings, rather than seeing them fall into decay, leaving no option but to demolish and rebuild.”
Fianna Fáil Cllr John Stephens praised the project’s ambition to bring life back into the city. He said he knows first-hand from working in the Mater Hospital just how life-changing these plans could be for frontline workers.
Cllr Silke said it's easy to feel “powerless” in tackling grand issues like this as a councillor, and it’s refreshing to see Cllr Farrell “get this over the line” as they move toward a “historic moment in driving Dublin city forward.”
People Before Profit Councillor Conor Reddy welcomed the development as an example of local representatives having a “serious impact” in ways that “the central government has failed to do.” He said: “This shows that dereliction isn’t inevitable and is something you can get to the bottom of. One word of caution going forward is that this remains councillor-led and whatever homes come out of it remain accessible to everyone and not feeding into gentrification.”
Fine Gael Cllr Colm O’Rourke highlighted this project as a rare example of unity among councillors. “Residents want to see councillors working together and we need to see more of it in the future,” he said.
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