“The implementation has fallen at the first hurdle, which was government funding,” says Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon.
In May 2024, in the wake of the Dublin riots, the government announced (another) taskforce for the city centre.
In October 2024, in the run-up to a general election, the taskforce released its report and recommendations.
Then Taoiseach, Simon Harris, a Fine Gael TD, in an op-ed in the Irish Independent, backed several of them.
Among the recommendations of the taskforce's report was funding “a minimum of 1000 additional gardaí in Dublin on a phased basis over the next three years”.
“I fully agree. People need to see gardaí and security to feel safe,” wrote Harris, who is now Minister for Finance.
“Dublin is a fantastic city. It deserves a brighter future. It deserves dedicated resources,” Harris wrote. “Let’s work together to make it a reality. Let’s put politics aside and deliver a capital city we can take pride in.
“I am up for it. I hope you are, too,” he wrote.
But that four-figure number for new gardai wasn’t mentioned in a June 2025 roadmap to deliver the taskforce promises, although it did list as an action, “strengthen community policing and engagement, increase visibility and carry out new recruitment and retention initiative”.
And, 18 months on, Garda figures show only around 40 additional Gardaí stationed in the city centre.
This recommendation from the taskforce is not the only one that seems to have been put aside or diluted.
The report also recommended “the total regeneration of all existing social housing in the city centre within three to five years”, with “Approval of exchequer funding in full, up front and made available directly to DCC [Dublin City Council].”
But the roadmap from the Interdepartmental Group, and the report that went alongside it seriously watered that down, saying only that flat complexes that are not already proposed for full-scale regeneration “in the foreseeable future” should be refurbished. Local representatives say that many of the buildings are so run-down that they need to be demolished.
Also, the timeline of three to five years for the works is gone, and so is the commitment to fund them up front.
There is confusion too as to whether a new “special purpose vehicle (SPV)” – a council-owned company – being set up is to drive forward all the recommendations of the taskforce, some of them, or just to tackle dereliction.
Some public representatives say the recommendations of the taskforce haven’t been implemented because there isn’t funding backing them. “The implementation has fallen at the first hurdle, which was government funding,” says Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon.
Others still have hope. There has been no progress thus far, but there could be in the future, they say.
A November 2025 press release from the Department of Housing says a new SPV within Dublin City Council will lead the implementation of the 10 big moves.
But there is confusion about the remit of that SPV.
Council manager Karl Mitchell said in February that it would implement many of the taskforce recommendations, but councillors say that at a recent briefing in the Mansion House, council managers said the focus of the SPV is primarily tackling dereliction.
“The SPV is primarily or exclusively a property development company,” says Green Party Councillor Janet Horner. “There are constant warnings about mission creep,” she says, “and the need to focus primarily on dereliction.”
But the city task force was supposed to deliver so many other things. “Where did the rest of it go?” she asks.
People Before Profit Councillor Conor Reddy says similar. “The SPV is primarily focusing on tackling dereliction,” he says. “All of the discussion focused on this development company.”
Councillors say the SPV will include works to revamp the GPO and O’Connell Street and possibly stretch to public realm works in that area.
What about social housing regeneration?
“No,” says Green Party Councillor Michael Pidgeon, who sits on several regeneration boards in the south inner-city. “No, the SPV has nothing to do with regeneration.”
The council has longstanding plans to regenerate 15 social housing flat complexes across the city, many of which are in the city centre.
Two of those are being built at the moment, most are at the pre-planning stage and due for estimated completion by 2031. One has not yet got any estimated completion date, shows the most recent housing supply report.
Probably the most eye-catching recommendation of the task force was to deliver 1,000 additional Gardaí for the city centre.
Last autumn’s City Centre Crime Victim Survey, commissioned by Dublin Inquirer with fieldwork and data preparation carried out by Amarách Research, found that people are afraid of Dublin City Centre.
Of the 505 respondents who said they live outside of the city centre and visit it 63 percent said they had decided not to visit the city centre because they feel it is too unsafe.
Meanwhile, of all 600 respondents to the survey, 12 percent reported that they had been a victim of theft in the city centre in the previous year.
Nine percent said they had been threatened in a public place, and 3 percent said that they had been threatened with a weapon.
Two percent said they had been “deliberately hit with fists or kicked”, and 1 percent said they had been injured with a weapon.
One proposed solution to making people feel safer – and be safer – in the city centre is “high-visibility” policing, as called for by the taskforce.
But as of February 2026, there were only 40 more Gardaí of all ranks stationed in the areas that include the city centre compared with December 2024, national Garda statistics show.
Dublin North Central corresponds exactly to the north inner city, while Dublin South Central is broader and takes in Donnybrook and Kilmainham as well as the city centre stations.
In December 2024, shortly after the taskforce report in late October, there were 668 Gardaí in north central and 713 in south central. Fourteen months later, in February 2026, there were 690 Gardaí in north central and 731 in south central.
The additional 40 Gardaí are working in shifts across nine Garda stations, so despite some reporting of greater Garda visibility, it wasn’t caused by any major increase in the number of Gardaí working on any given day in central Dublin.
Gannon, the Social Democrats TD, who represents the north inner-city, says he doesn’t believe the promise of 1,000 additional Gardaí was ever realistic.
But Harris backed the idea. He has not yet responded to queries emailed on Thursday as to what he has done since to implement those promises.
Gannon says that while there might be more gardaí on the beat on the main shopping streets like Grafton Street and Henry Street, some of those are being diverted from community policing duties in the disadvantaged communities, where he says things are worse than ever.
“The level of open drug dealing that is happening in some of the flats and at the back of them is enormous,” says Gannon.
“It is a policy of containment,” he says. “Clearly, that is being allowed to happen there so that it doesn’t spill into the commercial parts of the area.”
“It would be cynical to plan the rejuvenation of Dublin city centre without addressing the serious levels of deprivation in the area,” says the taskforce report.
“A chronic underinvestment in the existing social housing complexes in the city centre has led to substandard living conditions for many residents of the city, affecting their quality of living, economic stability and physical and mental health.
“Poor quality housing with inadequate amenities creates hotspots for antisocial behaviour that undermine the community’s quality of life and visitor experience,” it says.
The solution is the total regeneration of all of the dilapidated social housing flat complexes in the inner-city, to be completed in three to five years, it says.
Regeneration traditionally means demolishing and fully rebuilding the homes, but as some are protected structures – and given the carbon costs of knocking old buildings – the council has piloted approaches to keep the outer structure while gutting and fully renovating the inside.
The taskforce report recommends suspending the Department of Housing’s usual funding-approval mechanism and slashing red tape to allow work to proceed. “Approval of exchequer funding in full, up front and made available directly to DCC,” it says.
So far, no additional social housing flat complexes in the city centre have been added to the council’s list for regeneration since the task force issued its report, shows a comparison of the October 2022 housing supply report with the most recent one in April 2026.
All the regeneration projects on the list now were already there in 2022. Some of those were supposed to be completed this year but aren’t going to be.
Instead, the roadmap talks about “precinct improvement schemes” for some complexes. That’s talked about elsewhere as "internal and external refurbishment works to prolong the life of the complex and improve comfort levels for the tenants".
Local representatives say that many homes desperately need full regeneration.
Gannon says there are lots of social housing flat complexes in the inner-city that definitely need a full regeneration and are not on the list for that. For example, Greek Street, near the Four Courts, Henrietta House on Henrietta Street, and Liberty House on James Joyce Street, he says.
“We are going into people’s flats, and you could put your finger through the wall, they are that damp,” he says.
But these aren’t on the council’s current estate regeneration programme.
A lot of the complexes were not well built or maintained and are often overcrowded, said Gannon. It is not easy to fix them up after “decades of damp and mould”, he says.
Most of those regeneration projects that are happening or planned have been talked about for the last 20 years, he says.
None of the social housing flat complexes in the north inner-city has been added to the regeneration list since the taskforce report, Gannon says. “Not a single one – the only ones that are happening are the ones that were already in train,” he says.
Green Party Councillor Michael Pidgeon, who sits on some of the regeneration committees in the south inner-city, says similar. “Some have been on the list for regeneration since before the 2008 crash,” he says.
The council has not yet received any extra money for regeneration, nor have there been any major changes he is aware of to make the process faster or easier, says Pidgeon.
The Department of Housing often won’t fund the regeneration of inner-city complexes where they are already densely populated, he says, because it’s not possible to add extra homes and knocking small homes together can decrease the number of flats.
The taskforce’s recommendations were very wide-ranging.
The detailed text calls for investment in community policing, integration programmes and youth diversion programmes.
It covers measures to improve transport and to tackle rubbish, transport police, revamping the GPO and scrubbing up city streets.
The Department of Justice is rolling out a new Transport Security Service.
Horner says many of the other things are stuff the council was working on already, particularly around waste management, where it has introduced alot of measures lately.
In the June 2025 roadmap, multiple state bodies are tasked with rolling these out, but almost a year on, no one seems to be in charge of leading those.
“There is huge potential in the SPV to tackle dereliction,” says Horner, the Green Party councillor.
“But it is still not clear what is happening with the remainder of the ambitions that were laid out in the 10 big moves and the funding that was meant to be dedicated to it,” she says. “Dereliction is just one aspect of a wider strategy or a wider project.”
The Department of the Taoiseach, the Department of Housing and the Department of Finance didn’t respond to queries sent earlier this week about implementation of the taskforce’s recommendations in time for publication.
After 30 years, the finish line for the project was supposed to be close. The cost of the u-turn will be even greater homelessness, said the coordinator of Ballyfermot Traveller Action Project.
Enable Ireland has the new contract to operate 56 clothes banks in the city.
On volunteer-run community radio, there’s room for people with all kinds of accents – but it’s rare to move beyond that.
Its story reads like a cheap pastiche of Edgar Allan Poe, a century-long streak of tragedy and misfortune, ending in a fire in 2007.
