"When Councillor Deirdre Heney recently floated the idea that Dublin City Council look at policies to "encourage people away from the city", she likely thought she was being pragmatic. But she was also engaging in the kind of casual, top-down social engineering that treats the Irish citizenry like a nuisance to be managed rather than a population to be housed."
"I stayed living in Dublin because I work in the media. If you want to build a career in journalism in Ireland, particularly early on, you are here or you are nowhere. The jobs, the editors, the freelance scraps, the informal networks, they are all clustered within a few Dublin streets."
One hundred years of centralising economic and cultural functions in Dublin have concentrated jobs, editorial positions, freelance opportunities and informal networks within a small area. A proposal by a councillor to create policies that 'encourage people away from the city' frames residents as a nuisance to be managed rather than people needing housing and livelihoods. Many professionals, especially early-career journalists, remain in Dublin because the work, contacts and chance to build a career exist there. The clustering of opportunity in a few streets produces geographic immobility and undermines policies that merely push people away.
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