Long Read
Dirty old town: can Dublin’s trashed reputation be restored?
Anti-social behaviour, litter, derelict buildings: for many who work and live in Dublin, the capital feels like a shadow of its former self. What can be done to rescue the soul of the city?
A teenage couple sat sharing a bottle of Coke in front of the shuttered stage in Meeting House Square in Dublin as a man with visible cuts on his face shouting obscenities walked nearby. In the square itself, Claire Byrne, the Green Party councillor, was lamenting the area’s lack of social activity.
It was 5pm on a summer’s evening in the heart of Temple Bar, the most popular tourist area in Ireland’s capital city but, apart from the couple, the man with facial cuts, Byrne and a reporter from the Business Post, the area was deserted.
