Dublin needs more hotel rooms, but what it might need even more desperately is some kind of long-term vision
The accommodation might have been described as charmingly utilitarian, if your point of reference was the three-bed house you shared with 36 other people on your J1 visa in Nantucket: it featured two single beds end-to-end and two sets of single bunks. There was no lake in evidence, just a vista of a grubby wall – but then there aren’t too many lakes within a brisk walk of Connolly station.
Still, it was actually one of the cheaper offerings out there – especially if you brought nine friends – which may be why, when I checked again this week, it seems to be fairly heavily booked throughout the summer. The point being that crazy Dublin hotel prices have nothing to do with Taylor Swift economics, the phenomenon whereby a megastar announces a tour and instantly unleashes an epidemic of price gouging.
Pressed on the question of crazy hotel prices at Leaders’ Questions, Varadkar – bafflingly – seemed to suggest that the public would have to choose between housing and hotels. “We do not have enough hotels in the city of Dublin, but we do not particularly want a huge number of new hotels to be built, because one of the biggest challenges we are facing is the housing crisis.
Why does it have to be a binary choice? Couldn’t we imagine a city where, with proper planning, we could have enough of both – hotels and housing? The problem in Dublin isn’t a lack of space, if the figures for unpaid levies on vacant and derelict sites are any indication.
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