Loss of buses from Bluebell and Inchicore would harm Liberties traders, say campaigners

On Friday afternoon, residents of Dublin’s western suburbs, and traders who work on Meath Street, got together to talk about how to push back on planned changes to a bus route that connects their areas.

As part of its BusConnects reorganisation of the city’s network, the National Transport Authority (NTA) plans to replace the 13 bus – which now connects neighbourhoods including Inchicore and Bluebell, with the market street in the Liberties. 

The goal of the meeting – held at Little Flower Penny Dinners – was to rally Meath Street traders and local business owners behind a campaign to change the NTA’s plans so that a bus will maintain the historic connection between the two areas.

About a dozen residents of the west-Dublin suburbs attended the meeting, and maybe a half dozen people from Meath Street.  

Noel Fleming, who owns Noel’s Deli, said they’re against this bus-route change because of the deep cultural connection between the neighborhoods. Sinn Féin TD Máire Devine, who attended the meeting, said similar. 

Ties between the Liberties and suburbs like Inchicore go back to the mass relocation of working-class Dubliners from the city centre during mid-20th-century “slum clearances”, says Joseph Brady, author of several books in The Making of Dublin City series. 

Residents moved out to the suburbs. But they regularly came back to the Liberties.

“Community development was also slow to develop in these new suburbs,” said Brady, formerly head of UCD’s School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy, “and people missed the support networks that they had in town”. 

“Few got the opportunity to return to the centre and so they relied on the bus … as a way of both getting what they needed and maintaining their social networks,” Brady said.

The proposed bus route changes sever that social connection, and it could also hurt the businesses on Meath Street, business owners say – making it harder for some of their customers to reach them. 

A culture under threat

Fleming, who says he started working on Meath Street in 1963, says “The Liberties is a village within the city, and Meath Street is the heartbeat of the village.”

Says resident Jack Caffrey: “If you could bottle authenticity, this would be that place.” 

The bus is key to keeping the local culture alive, says Devine, the Sinn Féin TD. “The very thing that they're doing is diluting it, and it's in fear of disappearing, and we're going to fight that.”

At the moment, a person can catch a 13 bus through Bluebell, through Inchicore and Kilmainham, past St James’s Hospital, into Thomas Street, and alight right near Meath Street. 

But under BusConnects, the plan is to replace this with 57 and 58 routes, which would still run through Bluebell and Inchicore – but then swing through Islandbridge to Heuston Station – and on to the city centre via the quays.

There’s the G1 and G2, which will still run from Inchicore to Thomas Street. But a person from Bluebell would have to walk a kilometre or more to get one of those buses in Inchicore village.

Fleming says that if the 13 bus route stops connecting the two areas, “it will be the final nail in the coffin for the businesses in” Meath Street. 

“Thousands of people come every week to shop and deliver,” he says. “If they take this bus route off, we can just close up and go home.”

Caffrey, the local resident, says the Liberties is losing its identity. It’s “death by a thousand cuts for this community”, he says.

Fleming, standing on Meath Street, points south towards new developments visible at Newmarket. There are apartments, a hotel and student accommodation. 

“We used to see the mountains looking down the street there. Now we see these high-rise buildings,” he says. “Our community is being squeezed from every angle.”

“There's a thing called intangible cultural heritage. We don't know what it is, but we know what it isn't,” Fleming said. “And it's not that down there. It's not that,” he said, pointing at the new high rises.

He said he has no problem with new businesses moving in – Space Jaru, Bakeology. It’s the changes that make the current life inaccessible to the locals who grew up there.

"They're loving the place to death,” he says. “They think they're building up these beautiful places that tourists want to come to.” But, “if they don't keep what it is that makes it unique in it, they’ll destroy it,” he says.

Historic connection

The connection between the western suburbs and the Liberties goes back to the local government moving people out of poor-quality housing in the city centre, “especially around Gardiner Street from the 1940s onwards”, says Brady, the academic and author.

“People were moved in large numbers to good housing, but with relatively poor facilities,” Brady says.

“The Corporation relied on the private market to provide shops and other services and these were slow to arrive,” he said. “What did arrive was often felt to be too expensive and much more expensive than available in town.”

“People tried in large numbers to get back to central areas where they had these shops and services and where also there was a community structure into which they could plug [into],” he said.

Most did not have cars, so they relied on the buses – which brought them into James’s Street and the Liberties, “where they undoubtedly had relatives and where they felt that they could get what they needed”, he said.  

So the “hinterland of the shops and services in the Liberties stretched into the west, to Bluebell and beyond”, Brady says. “The remarkable thing is that the connections have continued into the present day with the passage of time and generations!”

Not enough, they say 

People from Bluebell and Inchicore have been protesting the NTA’s proposed bus route changes for months.

The NTA has engaged with them and made some changes to plans – increasing the frequency of the proposed routes going from these areas into town.

Instead of an hourly 58 bus from the area to town, the plan now is to have the 57 and 58 buses together serving that segment every 15 minutes. 

Plus there’s Luas and other public transport links – those will get residents close to the Liberties, or give them access to other transportation links.

But some residents say that’s not good enough. It’s not about just getting from A to B, they say. It’s about the direct link to a place that still feels like home.

In a document circulated recently, though, the NTA says it still does not plan to have the new 57 and/or 58 buses go into Thomas Street, which intersects with Meath Street.

“This was considered,” the document says. But they think the routes they have planned are better the way they are, it says.

They want a “15-minute service in Islandbridge and along Conyngham Road and the Quays," they said, “as well as to Tyrconnell Road and Bluebell”.

But at the meeting on Friday, the attendees said they weren’t done fighting the NTA for the bus service they want. 

The plan is to spread the word more. Door-knocking. A petition. A letter drafted by the traders – with help from Devine, the TD. Outreach at St James’s Hospital, and with students at the National College of Art and Design on Thomas Street.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.