On a recent morning, I opted for a picturesque walk through the heart of Dublin, along the Grand Canal. As I approached the Leeson Street Bridge, I noticed the canal flanked by imposing metal fencing from there to Baggot Street. The barriers, constituted of large two-metre-high joined metal panels, resembled the type used for crowd control at big events or temporary site enclosures.
As I ambled down Mespil Road, I found a gap in the barricade that led me to the canal pathway. This slender paved walkway was sandwiched between towering fences, blocking any access to the canal bank and the small grassy patch separating the canal path and road. Walking towards the Baggot Street Bridge, the sight of this recent addition unsettled me to the extent that I erupted in spontaneous laughter. The entire scene was ludicrously unattractive, almost bordering on comedic. In one instance, I paused to observe the odd spectacle of a lone tree encircled by three panels, resting on clumsy rubber weighted bases. The entire scene resembled an uninspired piece of contemporary art – it was absurd, perplexing, and randomly stark.
However, this scenario was not some avant-garde artist’s work, strive to make a social statement by blockading a canal, but the municipal efforts of Dublin City Council to manage the issue of asylum seekers in tents – by barricading a canal. Following their compulsory removal from the vicinity of the International Protection Office on Mount Street, several immigrants set up makeshift homes by the canal pathway, thus inspiring this fencing endeavour.
Looking beyond the hideousness and ignorance of this ‘solution’, one cannot ignore its visible ineffectiveness. Rather than making the tents vanish, it simply resulted in their concentration in a compact camp near Baggot Street Bridge for a while, before relocating them again. Even if the entire canal site had been successfully vacated of asylum seekers and their tents, would that constitute a genuine measure of success?
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The Grand Canal is a gem in the city, particularly the zone in question. A stroll along this stretch, particularly during this time of year, offers quiet transcendence. The area is synonymous with Dublin native Patrick Kavanagh, whose statue is peacefully perched on a bench near Baggot Street Bridge. He loved to celebrate the area with easy humorous majestic prose: “No one will divulge in mundane talk / who finds his way to these Parnassian islands”. But if anyone ever did delve into mundane discussions, it’s the Dublin City Council. Their encirclement of the canal feels like obscuring a poetic masterpiece by a censor with exceptionally weak literacy skills.
To my mind, the approach seems charged with malice. By obstructing homeless individuals from securing a temporary sanctuary, the authorities have wrecked a notably charming public space in a city which can ill afford such destruction. Urban design harbours a concept known as ‘hostile architecture’, where spaces are designed to be deliberately unwelcoming for specific types of use- metal studs on flat surfaces, for instance, and benches that are sloping or have armrests in the middle, to deter homeless individuals from using them for relaxation or sleep. Such techniques foster an unpleasant atmosphere, feeding into a kind of careless free-market ruthlessness and authoritarianism. However, the canal’s barricade is devoid of even the covert complexity of hostile architecture. Put simply, there’s no architecture, just raw hostility.
The government’s haphazard handling of homelessness is indeed a reflection of its overall incompetence in this area, a problem that predates its inability to manage the increasing numbers of asylum seekers. The sight of tents lining the canals is not a new sight, neither is the state’s blatant inability to resolve the issue. One cannot forget the tragic incident involving Elias Adane in 2020, a homeless individual from Eritrea, who was left paralysed when a heavy-duty construction machine attempted to remove his tent, in which he was present, from beneath the Leeson Street Bridge. The blatant disorder surrounding the fencing issue unequivocally points towards a government that is clueless about its actions in this arena but has recently started understanding that it must take action, or at least give the illusion of it.
The recent chaos includes the government providing funds to NGOs to arrange tents for asylum seekers and the homeless due to their own failure in providing emergency accommodation. The irony is that these tents are torn down and discarded in large disposal trucks by Dublin City Council within days. The fencing around the canal, which now obstructs its use for all city residents, not just the homeless, seems like a futile attempt by the government to appease the growing far-right anti-immigration lobby and to inject ‘common sense’ into its asylum policy, as Simon Harris suggests.
Enclosing the Grand Canal, making it inaccessible and unattractive to all residents, homeless or not, is not common sense. Putting asylum seekers into a dizzying and absurd situation— providing them with tents only to destroy them later, or bundling them onto buses and driving them halfway up the Dublin Mountains— is not common sense, rather it is sheer foolishness in action.
Foreseeing these issues before they escalate into full-blown crises and offering vulnerable individuals with emergency accommodation, that’s common sense. And the voters turning their backs on a government that has consistently failed to efficiently address homelessness: that, unequivocally, is common sense.