Olivia Kelly

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Olivia Kelly

The Molly Malone statue on Dublin’s Suffolk Street is to be put under protective watch to deter tourists from rubbing the figure’s bronze breasts, Dublin City Council has confirmed. The statue, which depicts a fishmonger immortalised in a mid-19th century music hall song, has over the last decade become subject to a dubious “tradition” where tourists rub its breasts for luck.

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Olivia Kelly

The former home of senior Kinahan crime gang member Seán McGovern, bought by Dublin City Council from the Criminal Assets Bureau (Cab) almost five years ago, remains vacant due to “physical threats” to workers who have attempted to renovate the property. Cab seized the house at 219 Kildare Road in Crumlin in March 2019 after the High Court the previous year ruled it had been bought with the proceeds of crime. In 2020 the house was sold to the council for use as social housing.

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Olivia Kelly

More than 20 years ago, in 2002, Dublin was hit by extreme tidal flooding with more than 1,100 properties inundated. It was an event that took the capital by surprise, as the last serious sea flood had occurred exactly 80 years earlier in 1922. Many of the flooded properties were in the southeast of the city and Dublin City Council determined new flood defences were required to protect more than 1,000 homes in Sandymount.

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Olivia Kelly

The State’s water and sewerage systems “are in a desperate state” because of “extraordinary complacency” and “passive indifference” around investment in infrastructure, Uisce Éireann chairman, Jerry Grant, has said. The goal of building 50,000 homes could not be met unless there was a “new approach from the Government” and “leadership from the very top” in developing water services, Mr Grant said.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Olivia Kelly

Local authorities are not “in any position to drive positive planning for big cities”, a conference on sustainable urban regeneration in Dublin has been told. The current planning system may be sufficient for rural Ireland but cities required a “radically different approach”, Senator Michael McDowell told the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) and Academy of Urbanism conference.