March organisers hope to 'shine a light' on mass dereliction in Irish cities

Last month's 'Walking Festival to End Dereliction' in Cork City led by Frank O’Connor and Jude Sherry. Photo: Larry Cummins

The organisers of a second march to raise awareness of mass dereliction in Irish cities say they hope the event will “shine a light, but also make people realise what’s possible” with vacant properties.

Sustainable systems designers Frank O’Connor and Jude Sherry will be among the marchers at Saturday’s ‘Walking Festival’ in Dublin, which follows the first such event which took place in Cork city on September 25.

The march has been organised in conjunction with Dublin group Reclaim Our Spaces and tenants’ union CATU and will commence in the capital from the old Arts Centre on City Quay at midday on Saturday.

The idea was Mr O’Connor and Ms Sherry’s brainchild upon their return to Cork three years ago having lived in Amsterdam for some years.

The pair say that having returned to a country in the midst of a housing crisis, they felt compelled to highlight the issue of dereliction for fear of Ireland “losing so much of its heritage”, something they have been doing now for the past 16 months.

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“We were so struck with the tension between homelessness and dereliction when we returned to Ireland,” Mr O’Connor said. “Some of the best feedback is people taking an interest and saying they’re looking around themselves and thinking ‘we’ve let this become normalised’.” 

Saturday’s march will be a mixture of speeches, music, and culture, Mr O’Connor says. The organisers are hoping to get about 100 people in attendance, and to “maybe pick up others as we go, people who are naturally interested”.

The march will run from the quays in the city centre via the Marckievicz Leisure Centre on the south side of the Liffey, up via Marlborough Street and Sackville Place and then on to the Gresham Hotel on O’Connell Street, before hitting Frederick Street (site of a high-profile Take Back The City protest in 2018), and then on to Dorset Street in the north inner city.

Miriam Sweeney of Reclaim Our Spaces said that the route for the Dublin march became clear to her and her fellow organisers as they pounded the pavements of inner city Dublin during Ireland’s many pandemic lockdowns.

She thinks there is an appetite among the public to look at “other models of development” to help solve the housing crisis, as evidenced by recent protests against prospective hotel projects at Merchant’s Arch in Temple Bar and the Cobblestone pub in Smithfield.