DublinTown Welcomes Establishment of a City Recovery Task Force

and the Appointment of a Director of City Recovery to Address Fallout Resulting From Covid-19 Crisis

Dublin city, like many other leading cities internationally, has been hard hit by the pandemic. Many city based businesses are financially fragile and vulnerable and a key task is to ensure that they survive into the post pandemic period, which with the advent of successful vaccines is coming closer by the day.

Link to announcement.

There will be structural changes post pandemic, but many of these were foreseen by DublinTown prior to the pandemic. Indeed, many of these emerging trends formed the basis of the Dublin One project which provides a template not only for what interventions are required but equally importantly how the public and private sectors can co-operate for the betterment of the city for our residents and visitors.

The city’s business community are core to the experience and opportunity within the city, they add to the city’s identity and have an innate understanding of direction that must be travelled. To be successful the interventions require structured private sector inputs from property owners, investors, and business practitioners. The business community’s expertise and customer understanding is available to Dublin City Council and must be harnessed constructively.

There has been much talk of a flight from the city. Some expect that current enforced behaviour patterns will become the norm and anticipate trends extrapolated from this. However, such analysis ignores the obvious fact that people are reacting to most unusual circumstances and restrictions. Almost universally people are expressing their unhappiness with their current lives and expressing the desire to get back to a level of previous normality. There is a reason why cities have grown exponentially in recent decades and history teaches that catalyst events such as Covid strengthen and accelerate trends that were evident before the event took place. We can anticipate, with confidence, that Dublin city will return to increased strength where the appropriate interventions are made. However, it is equally true that failure to act appropriately could lead to decades of decline. The city’s future is literally in our hands.

Richard Guiney said “It is encouraging to see that Dublin City Council is looking to the city’s future. A successful Dublin city is key to national recovery and therefore, DublinTown calls on Government to be an active participant in the regeneration process. We also believe that the city’s business community must be central to the decision making process and cannot be considered as interested spectators. Changes were afoot pre-Covid and these trends have been accelerated during the pandemic. We can create a vibrant and relevant destination where we make the right decisions but those decisions must be rooted in pragmatic reality combining commercial and social viability.”