Residents protest lack of action over St Teresa’s Gardens community centre

Local residents from the Tenters area in Dublin staged their second protest in recent months outside City Hall this week, calling for the reopening of their local community centre which was shut last year following a fire.

In June 2021, a fire broke out at the Donore Avenue Community and Youth Centre, forcing its closure. The building had previously been closed for a prolonged period due to restrictions imposed when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, meaning residents haven’t had access to the centre for almost three years.

Council officials have indicated it may not reopen until 2024.

On Monday, local woman Breda O’Hara stood outside Dublin’s City Hall alongside neighbours and friends chanting: “2024 - No way!”

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Ms O’Hara had been involved in running the summer camp for children in the area, which was attended by “at least 30 children per week”, she said.

“But we had to stop because we had no centre. With the pandemic we lost out there as well. You can see the deterioration in children’s mental health and a lot of the elderly,” she told The Irish Times.

“We’re having our centenary this year, it’s an old neighbourhood. We’re very community spirited, great neighbours, young and old,” Ms O’Hara said, adding that it was “depressing” to see it impacted in this way because of the closure of the centre.

Jacqueline Strawbridge, who is a mother of three young boys, said her children go to a local school with “very limited space - so any sport, football, drama, orchestra or anything, that’s enriching to them - the community centre is where they did it.

“Now that’s not available to them, they just don’t do it. Their development is being hampered - every child deserves that as part of their education,” she said. “Elderly people went there for cups of tea, when I was pregnant I went there to do yoga. It was a hub for the community and it’s just so depressing that there’s no urgency to fix it.”

Nine year-old Maite attended the protest with her mother. Maite told The Irish Times she “used to go to the centre after school and it was really good”.

“It was really fun, I went there with my best friends. We had lots of fun, we ate there and played games. I feel really sad and I want it to open - now.”

Though the centre was “relatively new, modern and well kit-out,” and only partially damaged by the fire in 2021, it’s taking the Dublin City Council a “totally unacceptable” amount of time to refurbish and reopen it, Dublin South-Central People Before Profit TD Bríd Smith said.

Ms Smith attended the protest on Monday in “full support” of the community.

“I used to have a clinic and meetings there. It was so well used by children in particular and it’s sorely missed. Fair enough [the council] have to do reports before it reopens but they’re talking about 2024 - it’s totally unacceptable.”

A letter from DCC to St Teresa’s Gardens Regeneration Board, seen by The Irish Times, said that while putting an exact time frame on its reopening was “not possible”, the council would “hope to have a contractor on side in mid-2023 with an estimated construction period of 12 months”.

The letter said it had “taken longer than expected” for the centre to reopen due to Covid-19 as well as “requirements to engage with all stakeholders on forensic and criminal investigations that had to be carried out into the cause of the fire”.