Prioritise and push for direct delivery of housing by Dublin City Council. As a sitting councillor I have seen how government policy leaves us trying to build housing with one hand tied behind our backs. Local authorities, including DCC, need to be resourced and trusted to deliver housing on the land available to us. If re-elected I will campaign for and vote for direct delivery of public housing – particularly social and affordable.

In the current council term, I introduced motions to the Development Plan to allow for affordable housing zoning which would have capped the value of certain rezoned lands for housing delivery (potentially lands currently zoned for industrial or religious use) ensuring affordability and community benefit. This is a measure which has been successfully implemented in Vienna. Almost all government party Councillors voted against this and the council management blocked the move, determining that it was contrary to national legislation.

My Dáil colleague and Social Democrats Housing Spokesperson, Cian O’Callaghan TD, recently brought forward amendments to the Planning Bill to create legislative change that would enable affordable housing zoning and was blocked by government from doing so. Delivering the social and affordable housing we need at the volume we need it will require this kind of creative and large-scale solution and I will continue to fight for these alternative approaches.

One of the issues that is very concerning to me is the conditions and terms for DCC’s social housing tenants. I would like to see an independent advocate become available for our tenants – someone they can turn to with tenancy issues such as maintenance or as we have seen in recent times exclusion from certain amenities in a development – and, if re-elected, will be exploring the provision of this either within our council staffing structure or through a tenant representative organisation.

In terms of private rented accommodation, the heart-breaking thing is that so many tenants are putting up with completely intolerable living conditions because they feel they have no alternative and/or that they will lose the housing they have if they speak up. I regularly meet and speak with constituents who are living without working showers/ovens/heating or living with black mould, drafty windows and similar who are paying extortionate rents to live in completely inadequate conditions.

In the short term there needs to be more inspection of private properties and greater efforts to hold landlords to account. There is a division within DCC that inspects private rentals but it doesn’t have the resourcing to significantly tackle the issue and needs greater funding and staffing. The longer- term solution is to roll out much more cost rental housing where rent is affordable, tenancies are secure and tenants have actionable rights to maintenance and upkeep. Providing people with viable alternatives to subpar housing is a must.

There is no one magic bullet solution to these problems and we have to consider balancing our needs and proactive versus reactive solutions. The more money spent on tackling dumping and littering, the less money there is for public art or playgrounds or creating positive public spaces/public realms. So, on the one hand there is the argument for resourcing more cleaning etc and in the council’s recent budget a lot more funding was allocated to street cleaning.

On the other hand, though is the idea of creating beautiful, accessible urban spaces to encourage people to engage with the city around them in a positive way. Both are necessary and we need a balance. One potential element of the solution to this is community wardens with responsibility for littering/dumping/dog fouling and ticketing of anti-social and illegal parking. More bins are another element of the solution. Remunicipalisation of our waste services would, I believe, go a long way towards tackling the chronic dumping issues.

We also need to ensure we have a city where our spaces are enjoyable, where families and people of all ages visit and participate, passive surveillance and positive use of our streets is vital. 

Vacancy and dereliction are an absolute scourge in our city. They are responsible for so much misery in terms of lost housing opportunities, lost creative opportunities and creating an overall sense of neglect and apathy.  The council needs to be more proactive in terms of these properties and some positive developments are beginning to happen in this space with the council buying derelict and vacant private property for transformation to homes. 

The real solution at scale to this problem is not at council level though and I think we need to be honest about that. If we persist in the narrative that the local authorities are the ones to tackle this then we fail to lay the blame where it really lies.

The government needs to introduce a vacant property tax with teeth. The tax they have introduced is pitiful at just three times local property tax – far below the rate of property value increases - and it is self assesed. If the goal was to design a measure that wouldn’t do the job, they nailed it. What is needed is a substantial vacant property tax with significant enforcement, which increases incrementally year on year to ensure investors are not sitting on vacant properties across our city while they accumulate value while damaging the social and economic fabric of our city. 

Again,this is a multi-layered question. There is no doubt – and I’ve never been a “bring in the Gardaí” person – that our city needs more visible policing and more community policing. More Gardai on foot/on bicycles interacting with and building relationships with the communities they work in would make a world of difference. The Joint Policing Committee for the North Central Area recently wrote to the Minister for Justice expressing our view that more police resourcing was vital for the area and we received a stock reply telling us that what we have is just fine. That is not, however, the experience of people on the ground. 

The more long-term answer is around investing in at-risk communities, providing better infrastructure and amenities in low-income areas and involving people in sport and the arts. Often the city feels unsafe because of those left at the margins of our society, people will attack and threaten something if they feel isolated or excluded from it and if they feel they have nothing to lose.

We need to work harder to engage young people who feel disconnected from our society and to offer them meaningful opportunities to engage, work and play within our city. We need to look at the impacts of multi-generational addiction and provide a health-based response to allow individuals and families to move out of a cycle of addiction. 

This might sound corny or whatever but very genuinely I got involved in politics because I have kids and I believe you cannot make your own children safe in a deeply unequal society, you have to work to make all the children around them safe as well. That means access to decent housing, healthcare, education – we make the city safer by treating all the people with dignity and respect and affording them the basics for a decent life. 

I’m a supporter of Busconnects and am looking forward to the roll out of the core bus corridors – I think that will go some way towards improving public transport in many areas of the city. Some of the orbital routes which have been introduced are very welcome in the communities I work for. We need to work faster and smarter to deliver major infrastructure projects like the metro. We need to expand capacity on our existing services – LUAS, DART and bus.

In all of this we need to keep accessibility issues for people with disabilities accessing stations and the buses/trains/trams themselves front and centre. We have failed on that in the past and our public transport has acted to disable people so we need to be aware and prevent it from happening again. Most of the people I speak to are open to using public transport but we have to make it as easy and reliable for people as possible. It should be much less hassle to get the bus than taking your car. 

In my time on the council, I have been supportive of all measures to improve walking and cycling facilities. In my own area the Griffith Avenue cycle lane and the larger Clontarf to City Centre project (C2CC) have had a mixed reception but I think once the work on the latter is complete, the cycle lanes are fully open and the lanes of traffic into town are open again, it will be worth it. 

I want to see a city where a ten-year-old can cycle to school or football or gymnastics without worrying about their safety. Think about how much the congestion reduces when the schools are off. If we make it safe for children to cycle, walk or scoot to school we’ve improved things for everyone – drivers included.  I hope to see in the coming term the further roll out of the North Central Area cycling network – including planned cycle lanes from Finglas to Killester and from Edge’s Corner to Parnell Street. This will involve, however, electing people who support these measures.

In terms of walking, I will be advocating for the roll out of more zebra crossings to give pedestrians right of way when crossing and of more of the continuous footpaths we see in the C2CC design. Then we need to get the basics right – keeping footpaths in good condition has been important to me during this term and I will push for greater investment in footpath repair and upkeep in the wider Clontarf local electoral area.

Like so many people out there I am upset, angered and frightened by the rise in this kind of sentiment and action. Like most of my constituents and community I value inclusion, diversity and a warm Irish welcome. I consider myself an activist as much as a public representative and one of the key reasons I am in this role is to actively push back against the tide of this kind of hatred.

Over the years, I have attended countless solidarity marches, Trans Pride parades, Dublin for All gatherings and the like. I am an active and proud member of the Dublin Bay North for All (DBN for All) team and in the past year have been involved in organising a diversity and inclusion family festival in Bram Stoker park with members from across our community, both long standing and more recently arrived, which was attended by approx. 3,000 and featured performances from a variety of nationalities and cultures.

In recent weeks, I have helped through the DBN for All group with fundraising for the men seeking asylum at the International Protection Office on Mount Street – raising over €9k to meet immediate needs and then transferring the remaining amount to the Muslim Sisters of Eire and the Movement of Asylum Seekers of Ireland to continue supporting new arrivals. People’s anger and fear at – in my experience –a lack of housing for them, their children and their grandchildren is being weaponised by a minority of far right actors and we need to provide alternatives to direct that anger where it belongs – at the failure over decades to provide public and affordable housing, at the underinvestment in disability services and supports, health care, education and so on.

It is up to those of us who value a diverse inclusive Dublin to build an alternative to the hate that is being pushed, an alternative that focuses on everyone having access to the basics that allow for a decent life.