Almost €3 million was spent by Dublin City Council buying two Victorian commercial buildings that have been left vacant due to a lack of resources to convert them into social housing.
The two 19th-century buildings, a former bank and an antiques shop, were bought as part of the council’s “adaptive reuse” programme, a city regeneration scheme designed to combat dereliction and provide homes through the reuse of vacant properties.
The conversion of vacant and derelict buildings into housing was one of the 10 recommendations of a Dublin City Taskforce report published last October.
The adaptive reuse unit was set up by the council in October 2022 and had already assessed more than 500 buildings’ suitability for conversion into homes, ahead of the publication of the taskforce report.
RM Block
Feasibility studies were prepared for 15 conversion projects and the first three properties were bought at a total cost of €6.35 million. However, the scheme has been radically curtailed and just one project is proceeding, the adaptation of a modern office block in Ringsend. The conversion of the other two buildings is “not currently being progressed”, the council said.
The Ringsend building, a 1990s office block at 14-15 Fitzwilliam Quay on the Dodder river, is attached to a larger apartment scheme. The council paid €3.55 million for the offices and plans to convert them into 15 apartments.
The council bought Kerr House, a protected structure at 114-116 Capel Street, for €1.7 million last year. Built in the 1870s as a merchant’s house, it became a theatre, then traded as Oman Antique Galleries, closing before the pandemic. The top two floors were to be converted into four apartments with the ground floor retained for commercial use.
The Bank of Ireland at 371-373 North Circular Road in Phibsborough closed in 2021. Dating from about 1890, it was built as part of a terrace of commercial buildings, running east from Doyles Corner. The council bought it for €1.1 million early this year, with the intention of converting it into four apartments at ground and first-floor level.
“The projects to convert the Capel Street building and the North Circular Road building are not currently being progressed,” the council said. “However, plans to progress these projects will be advanced in due course.”
The council’s head of housing, Mick Mulhern, in recent months told councillors the adaptive reuse team had done a “huge amount of really positive work” that would “feed into a wider council strategy” with a “dedicated team with some certainty around how this work can be funded”.
However, it had been “a huge amount of work for a small amount of housing output,” he said. “At the moment really we are down to a numbers game,” he said. “Ultimately we are using the resources that we have to try and deliver as many homes as we can in the quickest time possible. I don’t think anybody would disagree that that’s the right thing to do.”
Green Party councillor Janet Horner said adaptive reuse “remains the best use of these buildings” on Capel Street and in Phibsborough. “It is a programme with very strong reasoning behind it beyond just costs and number of units,” she said.
“Anyone with two eyes in their head is looking at the amount of empty office spaces in Dublin and looking at the housing crisis, and thinking surely these two things can be matched together to help solve the problem.”
Social Democrats councillor Cian Farrell, who chaired the council’s urban redevelopment working group, which is due to report shortly, said it focused on “holistic end-to-end regeneration of the city centre, and adaptive reuse is an element of that”.
