After The Currency reported the idea of the council moving its HQ, councillors were talking about and thinking through the pros and cons and implications.
“Talk about David and Goliath,” says Tony McDonnell, gesturing upwards at the seven-storey building directly next door to his home on Mayor Street Upper in the Docklands. “Well that is Goliath.”
Over the last week or so, James Kirwan has stashed paintings along Dublin’s streets as gifts to strangers. “This is my project to cheer people up,” he says.
The cost for those reliant on Housing Assistance Payment has gone up in many cases, pushing tenants into debt and poverty as they struggle to cover “top-ups” to landlords and scrape together deposits.
For Adam Hutchinson, who features, the film was a chance to reply to those who assume horses in the inner city aren’t well looked after. “But that is not the case,” he says.
“These people are caught in a catch-22 situation and they are going to be on the streets the whole winter and for the whole of lockdown,” says Anthony Flynn, CEO of Inner City Helping Homeless.
Despite the success of Korean Kickboxing Cabra, the future of the club is in jeopardy. The converted warehouse where they’ve coached and trained for the last 10 years is mooted for demolition.
An ambitious plan that Pádraic Fogarty, an ecologist with the Irish Wildlife Trust, says he would like to see is a “green corridor” running through the city for animals to move around.
Since lockdown, anyone who is newly homeless has struggled to be recognised as such, says Louisa Santoro, CEO of the Mendicity Institution, while those from outside of Dublin have been locked out of the system.
Since last February, councillors in a cross-party working group have met, to thrash out what a new model for public housing for the city should look like.
