Breathing new life into Ballymun's community spirit

A €3 billion regeneration plan was unveiled for Limerick this week. What has been the Ballymun experience?

Its transformation has been dramatic. Eleven years ago visitors to Ballymun would have found the approach to the north Dublin suburb depressing. The awaiting vista was seven grey, concrete, 15-floor towers of flats punctuating a horizon of wasteland, with freely roaming horses, few shops and row upon row of smaller blocks of flats.

Envisaged in the mid-1960s as a vibrant, self-contained town and an answer to acute housing shortages in the capital, by the mid-1970s the annual tenant turnover rate in Ballymun was more than 50 per cent and unemployment was chronic. By the mid-1980s heroin was devastating the community. The area was poorly maintained. There were few shops; playgrounds were vandalised; transport links to the city centre were all but non-existent and vast open fields around the flats became dumping grounds for burnt-out cars and unwanted appliances.

By 1997, when Dublin City Council began drawing up plans for the town's regeneration, the very name Ballymun had become a byword for disillusion and a community at rock bottom.

Today there is a different Ballymun. Sleek civic offices, a bright, inviting arts centre, two hotels, a modern user-friendly health centre, leisure centres and a light-filled Garda station. Add to this the soon-to-open first branch of Swedish furniture giant Ikea, which planners hope will attract people from every corner of Ireland to this once chronically depressed town.

Eighteen of the 36 original apartment blocks have been demolished, with seven more scheduled for demolition in 2009.

Almost 1,500 new housing units have been provided in five distinct neighbourhoods around the buzzing Ballymun town centre. Indeed if proof of its "buzz" were needed, the weekly farmers' market was doing brisk business on the concourse in front of the Axis arts and community centre on Thursday last, despite the rain.

The transformations, managed and implemented since 1998 by Ballymun Regeneration Limited (BRL), are projected to cost €977 million by completion.

The changes in allymun will be of huge interest to the people of Limerick. This week, a €3 billion Limerick Regeneration Plan was unveiled - the biggest of its kind in the history of the State. Like Ballymun, it aims to transform some of the city's most deprived areas, including Moyross, Southill and St Mary's Park.

The draft plan, unveiled on Tuesday, has the three key pillars of economic, physical and social regeneration.

In Ballymun the physical changes include small shopping concourses, with branches of Centra and Supervalu alongside butchers, barbers and pharmacies in bright, modern estates. Trees line well-maintained roads, many houses are arranged around squares with playgrounds, and crucially, says Ciarán Murray, managing director of BRL, the housing design varies from area to area.

"We had to meet a huge variety of housing needs and achieve a variety of styles. We wanted to get away from the same houses for miles and miles, that wilderness, to a sense of home in smaller estates. We wanted to design out the opportunities for anti-social behaviour."

Whether they have achieved is that is a matter for debate. Linda Brogan has just moved from a flat on Silogue Road with her two teenage sons into a three-bedroom house on Silogue Court.

"Isn't it beautiful?" she says, welcoming visitors into her large living room, which backs through patio doors into a spacious garden complete with garden furniture and myriad fuchsia, marigolds, and sweet pea. Her modern kitchen has Shaker-style cupboards. "It is much better. I really love coming home from work now," she says proudly.

However, she goes on, there have been on-going problems with anti-social behaviour. Almost cheek by jowl with her new house is a block of flats that has been cleared of tenants, from which young people throw rubbish into her and her neighbours' gardens.

"The council should have made sure they cleared the flats of all that stuff. The lads were throwing old fridges, cookers, nappies, awful stuff, down. We had the police in over and over but please God it's sorted now."

Local councillor Bill Tormey says a "more active and robust view of anti-social behaviour" by the Garda is paying off. They have launched an initiative targeting the top troublemakers in Ballymun and have been having success.

"There have been issues where the community felt they weren't being consulted properly," he says. There have been other problems, with residents complaining about dirt and safety during the process. There have been some serious glitches, such as when a number of building firms went into liquidation three years ago, leaving homes unfinished and huge delays to the whole project as new firms were sought.

"But, on the whole, the regeneration is being delivered. It is almost a prototype for how to do it," say Tormey.

The Axis community and arts centre is one example of where great effort has been made to involve the community.

Director Ray Yeats explains the original plan was to have separate arts and community centres, though funding issues forced them into one building. "It has worked out well. There is a natural synergy between the two functions." As well as a creche and meeting rooms, the centre has recording studios, dance studios, a 220-seat theatre, art workshops and a cafe.

"I was determined that it would be run to the highest professional standards and that the community would use all the facilities. Art and community development is an attitude, not an an activity."

Michael Byrne, who has been a resident of Ballymun since the 1960s, describes the centre as the "joy" of his life. Having loved theatre since a child, he is now involved in drama at the Axis. He will be in the Christmas panto, Little Red Riding Hood. "I was always involved in variety groups and I would have given my left arm to have this place as a younger man.

"Ray Yeats has revitalised this town. This building is a happy building and so many young people are involved here, seven days a week. I adore what it has given us."

In the canteen of the civic offices later, Ciarán Murray speaks of the final four-year stretch to the full realisation of the original vision.

"The past 10 years have been a roller coaster. Every step has revealed incredible stories, from the very sad to the inspiring, and are a testament to the fortitude of everyone involved, often in trying circumstances. We always had an incredible team who shared the vision and who, essentially, wanted to rewrite history. I believe we have delivered a transformation in not only the environment but in people's expectations. The challenge will be to see this is a self-sustaining community into the future."

FLAT FACTS

Originally 36 blocks of flats including seven 15-storey blocks named after the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation. So far demolished: six of the 15-storey, four 8-storey and eight of the 4-storey.

Due for demolition in 2009 five eight-storeys and two four-storeys.

Remaining 10 eight-storeys and one 15-storey (Joseph Plunkett tower). About 50 per cent of remaining flats are still occupied.

New local authority and affordable homes 1,440 built, 330 unoccupied, 307 at tender, 134 at design stage- a total of 2,211.

Private homes 1,480

Cost to State to date €696m

Projected final cost €977m