Labour Party veteran Joe Costello bows out of politics aged 78

Recent high-profile attacks on tourists in Dublin city centre have created a sense of menace about the city’s streets and a perception, at least, that the capital is not safe.

Earlier this year, veteran Labour politician Joe Costello had his own brush with thuggery, outside his home in Stonybatter in the north inner city, when he tried to reason with a gang of anti-immigration protesters spreading fear locally about the use of a sports hall on Aughrim Street to accommodate refugees.

“What happened at the time was strange in the sense that there’d been Ukrainians in the sports centre regularly and we did a lot of work with them locally, and people were offering all sorts of things, vouchers for local shops etc,” he says.

Then in February social media posts from anti-immigrant activists began to spread misinformation about dangers being posed to local women and children by those who would be accommodated in the centre.

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“I was asked by a couple of local people would I come along to a meeting and just tell them what the situation was, and of course I said I would,” says Costello.

A huge crowd, about 300, he estimates, had arrived on Aughrim Street on a Thursday evening, some local, others he recognised from East Wall and Ballymun, many he had not seen before, and several wearing masks. Having already marched up Prussia Street and blocked traffic along the North Circular Road, they were “up to high doh” by the time they reached him.

“They didn’t want to give me the microphone and I said, ‘I’m here because people invited me and I’m a local myself‘ and grudgingly I was given the microphone,” Costello says. “I started talking and they weren’t pleased with what I had to say so they shouted me down and then, I suppose, about 20 of them, the hardliners, started to move in and rushed me and grabbed the microphone.”

Video footage posted on social media shows the incident, with large groups of men and women shouting expletives in the former TD’s face before a masked man grabs the microphone.

“The guards were there, but they didn’t intervene, they took a very low-profile approach to it”, he says. “The following day there were only about 20, the day after there was nobody and it never happened again. But it is one of the things I’d worry about, that sort of right-wing development, the anti-immigrant sentiment being allowed to build in certain communities.”

The incident, he says, is illustrative of what can go wrong when there is a failure by authorities to engage with communities, something which has been endemic in the north inner city for as long as he can remember.

“I started work as a teacher in 1972 and the north inner city then was very impoverished. There was high unemployment and very poor-quality housing, so it was ripe for drugs. But there was very little attention paid to it by the powers that be because it was something that took place in the flats,” recalls Costello.

“We couldn’t get guards interested, even harder to get the medical people interested, and that was compounded very quickly by the HIV pandemic that came about in the early ‘80s.”

Gardaí at the time, he says, seemed more interested in arresting market traders who were not complying with new casual trading legislation which came into force in the mid-1980s.

“These women were criminalised overnight. The guards were seizing their prams and putting them in the Paddy wagons and taking them down to the station. They were selling strawberries, this was in the middle of summer, and they were being charged £12.50 to get their prams back when the strawberries were gone off.”

He was arrested while protesting with the women in O’Connell Street in 1985, along with inner city politicians Christy Burke and Tony Gregory. “I spent a week in prison.”

Costello stood for election for the first time for the Labour Party in 1987. “I didn’t get elected. There was all sorts of scurrilous literature put out against me — ‘vote for Joe Costello the criminal’s friend’.” He had been a founding member and chairman of the Prisoners’ Rights Organisation

He was elected to the Seanad in 1989 and to the Dáil in 1992, later becoming a junior minister. On Wednesday, Costello retired from his role as a Dublin City Councillor after 35 years in politics.

In the 1990s, three taskforces — for Smithfield, the O’Connell Street area, and the northeast inner city — were established. While Smithfield saw some successes, the others made little progress, says Costello. While further funding has more recently been directed to the northeast inner city, it has “remained difficult to get anything done there, with the gang activity taking place and the fallout from that. It’s been very stagnant from that respect.”

The lack of progress for communities in the Docklands and East Wall has been particularly disappointing, he adds.

“The great pity of it all is the Docklands. The great driving engine of economic development in the country, not alone the north inner city,” he says. “It was supposed to raise all boats and it didn’t. You have all these fine buildings, a lot of the international companies have their headquarters down there, but it is cheek by jowl with the indigenous population without any integration taking place and still very high unemployment.”

There should, he says, have been a “huge injection into education”, particularly apprenticeships. He says every young person should be able to see a pathway to prosperity without needing to get involved in drugs.

“It’s so easy to see the amount of money that can be made through drugs. That’s the one thing that’s visible all the time. They see themselves in a different world and no real attempt has been made to break down that barrier.”

Costello does not think life in the north inner city is worse now than it was in the 1980s, but he still sees concerning similarities.

“I remember the Bugsy Malones in the 1980s [a teenage crime gang named after a children’s film released at the time] robbing handbags, breaking into cars. There was a huge amount of antisocial behaviour we forget very easily,” he says.

“Kids were wild then and when you see what’s happening now, it’s all teenagers involved too.”

Costello, at 78, is leaving representational politics behind but will still be involved in the “community side of things”.

“I think the great failure of the system is that community hasn’t been engaged with,” he adds. “The whole city is a series of urban communities, the local authority doesn’t see them in that fashion. There should be a massive increase in the number of community officers in the local authority to build up that community because that is the best bet against crime.”