In the past few days it has been announced that one of the measures to be considered by the new Dublin Task Force established by the Government is whether to tax tourists for the privilege of visiting the capital.
According to the Taoiseach, the purpose of such a tax would be to help “revamp” Dublin, and improve the general look and feel of the place. Apparently the amount of cash that such a tax would rise would be somewhere between four, and forty-one million euros annually.
We’ll start with the obvious: There’s not much you could do to revamp Dublin with forty-one million euros annually. And if there was, then the Government could easily afford to hand that money over tomorrow. The projected annual budget surplus for Ireland in 2025 – at the time of writing – is nine point seven billion euros. Forty-one million euros is a drop in the bucket compared to that sum.
In any case, the problem with the Dublin City Taskforce is not all the questions it will undoubtedly ask, like whether a tourism tax works. It is the question they will not ask: Who is Dublin for, exactly?
The reason the city needs a “revamping” in the first place is that nobody has really bothered to think about that question for about thirty years, and to the extent that people have been thinking about it, they have come up with the wrong answers.
For example, somewhere along the line, it was decided to place not one, not two, but seven methadone clinics in or around the City Centre, for the convenience of heroin addicts. It should hardly therefore be surprising to find addicts and homeless people sleeping on the streets, or on benches that were theoretically put in place as public amenities. The people attracted to the city centre by planning and policy decisions like this one are not the law-abiding citizens, but those with severe problems.
And when you have addicts, dealers follow. When you have addicts, crime follows. You can re-vamp Dublin all you want with your forty-one million euros a year, but so long as the city has a policy of tolerating addiction and vagrancy, those parks will still be places that tourists and law-abiding citizens decline to visit.
I am, fortunately, not possessed of a good sense of smell. But multiple friends who are tell me for example that various parts of the public spaces around O’Connell Street emit a constant and pungent odour of human urine, because somewhere along the line we decided that public urination at night would be tolerated. Again: Who is Dublin City for? Those who wish to enjoy it, or those who wish to disrespect it?
The contrast with other European Cities is palpable. In Krakow, last year, I observed a man on the street, clearly drunk, drinking from a bottle in a paper bag. I also observed a police van pull up, detain him, and take him away, because he had committed the crime of public intoxication. That does not happen in Dublin, or indeed in any Irish city, because we have decided that standards of behaviour should not be enforced, because it is not humane to do so.
Now, we are apparently considering taxing tourists to come and see (and smell) these sights.
The whole thing was summed up, I think, by that episode last year where some genius thought it would be a good idea to set up a “portal” to New York, providing the Americans with a live feed of life in central Dublin. That lasted about a week because, once again, the City Centre is the habitat of people who behave antisocially. Let’s be absolutely clear about from whence the bad behaviour emanated: New York had one Onlyfans model who decided to claim some fame by exposing her breasts to Dublin. On our side, people held up images of the burning world trade centre on 9/11, played hardcore porn on their phones, projected abuse about America, and generally behaved like animals. Nobody was ever held to account for that conduct, or arrested.
Once again, Dublin is being run for the anti-social minority, not for the law-abiding citizen.
One of the funny things about Ireland is the amount of pride people take in this country but the entirely callous way they let standards in the country drop, and then let bad behaviour be written off as “the craic”. Couple this with a political system that appears to regard crime and drug addiction as something committed by people who have been failed by society, and you get a capital city that is entirely unattractive to the law-abiding citizen. Revamp it all you like, but until standards are actually imposed, all you are going to get is offensive graffiti and bad behaviour.
The idea of taxing tourists to come and visit Dublin City Centre would be laughable if it were not so offensive. What is actually laughable is the idea that the City Centre’s problems will be fixed with an art installation here, or a new pedestrian street there, or a statue on a bridge. The fact of the matter is that it’s not that long ago since Dublin genuinely had a city centre people wanted to visit and spend time in.
It’s not that the architecture has degraded or the beauty of the old place has fallen away. It is that standards have fallen, and society as a whole has forgotten who it is supposed to be prioritising.
The cleanup of the capital could indeed be carried out for forty-one million euros a year. But every cent of that should be spent on Garda overtime, with a mandate to crack down on the anti-social behaviour that is ruining the place, and making it unpleasant.