Dublin City Council is going to war on litter. Not litter generally – not the split refuse bags vomiting their innards all over the inner city, or the shards of glass transforming sticky pavements into an obstacle course. Not the discarded fast food wrappers or takeaway containers or the stray items of unwanted clothing or the crumpled coffee cups or the candy-coloured vapes glinting in the gutters. Not the human excrement deposited in doorways, or any of the myriad visual delights Dublin offers visitors. I still love Dublin, despite what often feels like its best efforts. But even its most ardent admirer would have to concede that the city is a mess.
Unfortunately, the council is focusing its efforts on a different sort of littering. It announced this week that it would be launching an all-out offensive on Airbnb style lockboxes – or key boxes – that have been attached to poles and bikestands around Dublin. The small boxes, which are opened by pin code, are used by people who rent out properties on a short-term basis to circumvent the need to have to meet their tenants in person.
Left strewn around the city, these boxes, the council said, “give rise to issues regarding liability for any accidents, trips or other injuries in the public realm”. It is worried that if they’re lying on the ground, “they may become contaminated” – a spectre that, if you’ve spent any amount of time in Temple Bar after hours, is all too easy to visualise. And so it has asked councillors to endorse an official policy “that lockboxes being used in the public realm will be removed and destroyed”.
Despite what the council says, however, this is not really about health and safety. It is hard to see how anyone would trip over a keybox dangling from a bicycle rack, or even one attached to a pole at pavement level, unless they were in more immediate danger of a collision with the pole itself. If the council is serious about removing trip hazards from the streets, it could start with some of the ugly clutter it is responsible for dumping there, like the utility boxes proliferating everywhere.
Who’s who in the controversy over Arts Council spending?
A surreal Sunday on my Stoneybatter doorstep: ‘People have been stabbed, go inside and lock the door’
How ‘outsider’ Jack O’Connor continues to fly in the face of Kerry’s style police
Harsh to blame Verona Murphy after Micheál Martin ignites slow-burning brouhaha
Sure, repurposing a bike stand to act as your back-to-basics concierge service is a cheeky misuse of public infrastructure, but it’s hardly the most pressing problem Dublin faces.
What is really happening is that the lockbox has become the latest lightning rod “in the battle against overtourism”, says the Guardian. In cities around the world – most recently Paris and Nice, but also Marseilles and Lille in France and others in Italy – the unprepossessing lockbox has emerged as a symbol of a particularly virulent strain of urban discontent. It is a physical reminder of the presence of one of the most galling manifestations of housing inequality, the spectre of illegal Airbnb lettings. Given that promises to clamp down on these have so far come to nothing, targeting lockboxes looks like an easy win.
The notion, however, that Dublin is suffering from overtourism seems slightly fantastical. There are many things dulling its shine – see the opening paragraph for several of them – but I doubt if “too many tourists” ranks at the top of most Dubliners’ lists. I was surprised to see it feature last September on an “overtourism index” that compares the number of international tourists to local inhabitants. But if it was cause for concern even then, it’s less of a concern now.
In fact, data from November and December suggests we may soon be grappling with precisely the opposite problem. In the first 11 months of 2024, 6.2 million visitors travelled to Ireland, up an encouraging 7 per cent on 2023. But visitor numbers were down 5 per cent in October, and fell by nearly 9 per cent in November on the previous year, with spending down 5 per cent and the length of stay reduced by 18 per cent. In December tourist numbers were 12 per cent below the previous year, and spending was down 20 per cent.
A two – or even a three-month – downturn in tourism figures is hardly cause for panic, but it’s not a bad time to look objectively at what Ireland – and Dublin in particular – has to offer. One way to find out why tourists may be turning away from Dublin is to ask them. A survey by Dublin City Council in 2023 did exactly this. The number one answer to the question of what would make Dublin better for visitors was greater affordability (36 per cent). Twenty-two per cent of respondents wanted public safety and antisocial behaviour tackled; 20 per cent wanted the city cleaned up. Unsurprisingly, nobody mentioned Airbnb lockboxes.
You don’t really need data to see that Dublin has a dire image and ambience problem. You just need to walk around it. The council seems to have conceded defeat in the battle against litter. Every Irish town and city suffers from dereliction, but Dublin’s problems – starkly catalogued by this newspaper in recent weeks – seem especially intractable. The city’s complex social problems – addiction, homelessness, poverty – are much more urgent than merely matters of aesthetics or atmosphere, but their impact is depressingly apparent in pockets of the city centre. Restaurants are closing at an alarming rate. And a city that only the very wealthy can afford to make a life in is one suffering from built-in obsolescence.
[ Thirty ways to immediately improve life in DublinOpens in new window ]
Just as the culture wars came for face masks and e-scooters, so too have they come for Airbnb lockboxes. The council is probably wise to choose a side, even if you can’t help wishing it would turn its newfound blitzkrieg energy on more urgent targets. Going to war on Airbnb style lockboxes might help create the illusion that something is being done by someone somewhere. But it’s no substitute for a strategy to tackle the mess that is Dublin.
