I wish to raise a matter that has been bubbling away for a number of years in our city, which is now beginning to come to a head. It is the destruction of our historic, cultural and social spaces in our capital city. The Moore Street Quarter is one of the most important intact battlefield sites in Europe and yet it was threatened with complete demolition a number of years ago. It was only after the heroic campaign by the relatives of the 1916 Rising that the demolition was stalled. The situation is still not fully resolved. When I raised this matter with the Secretary-General of the Council of Europe at the time, she could not believe that a country would destroy such a site to make way for more retail when other European countries were literally rebuilding, brick by brick, their battlefield sites that were destroyed in World War II.

Moore Street is not the only example of how little respect Ireland has for the fabric of its capital city. The O'Rahilly house is another example that was destroyed by a hotel developer. Now we hear that Merchants Arch and the iconic Cobblestone pub are to be modified to make way for hotels. During Covid-19 young people were blocked from accessing public spaces. They were being moved on and we were told that if public toilets were to be provided it would only encourage people to come into the city. Murals are painted over because they do not have planning permission, instead of platforming our artists like every other European city with their fantastic examples of modern and contemporary artists' work on the walls.

What is happening to our capital city is tragic. We are fast becoming a capital that is purely for tourists and business and not for the communities which actually live here. There are a number of reasons for this problem. One is the city development plan is far too weak. Too often those weaknesses lead to bad planning decisions so the plan must be strengthened. Second, we need to hear from the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage about Government planning policies that have made matters worse, especially the guidelines put in place by the previous Minister, Eoghan Murphy. They must be scrapped. We need planning policy that actually protects the historical fabric and also the contemporary cultural spaces we have within our city to make it vibrant and livable. Finally, we need Dublin to have a directly-elected mayor because only then will we be able to elect somebody who can set out their vision for the city in holistic approach. This is as opposed to the current system where we have the CEO of the city council and councillors who are working, rightly, for their local areas. We absolutely must have a directly-elected mayor to have a vision for the city.

I encourage everybody to sign the petition to stop the destruction of the Cobblestone and the modification of Merchant's Arch. We must take a stand and preserve what is left of the fabric of our city.

I was going to raise exactly the same issue but in a slightly different way. We see the plan to replace Merchant's Arch with a nine-bedroom hotel. We see the plan to replace the Cobblestone with a nine-bedroom hotel. We are looking at the city develop and essentially hollow-out all its cultural spaces to have a cookie-cutter version of culture one can find anywhere.

In addition to those commercial enterprises and ventures which are essentially being changed into cookie-cutter versions of hotels, we are also seeing a crisis in artistic spaces and studio spaces which has been going on since 2015. In 2015, myself and Councillor Claire Byrne of the Green Party worked on the Dublin City Development Plan to try to include cultural and artistic spaces in it, such that where there would be large-scale developments, there would be an element of studio and cultural space included in it. That came off the back of Broadstone artists' studios, which had been in operation for 20 years and paid to its landlord more than €1 million in rent during that time. Through that, what was happening was the Department with responsibility for arts and the Arts Council were essentially giving the studios programme funding to be able to pay that landlord its rent. Then the landlord decided to sell up and the organisation was kicked out. The studios were never re-established. We see this happening all over the city. We see it happening in my area of Dublin 8 at the moment. Pallas Projects/Studios works within the arts and has provided both exhibition and studio space within Dublin 8 at a number of different sites over the last number of years. Its lease is up in February. When that happened at Broadstone, myself and Councillor Byrne set up a studio arts space but what we wanted was for the Department to provide studio and workspace providers with capital funding so they could buy their own buildings and not be kicked out every couple of years.

As part of the budget next week, I would like to see a commitment to capital funding for arts and culture spaces, in Dublin in particular, but also around the country. It is bad policy and bad planning that when it comes to cultural capital we are essentially providing the housing assistance payment, HAP, rather than social housing. I ask the Government look at providing mortgages and long-term loans to artists' studios to be able to buy the premises they are in and to have a clause that ownership reverts to the local authorities if those organisations end up winding up. It is simply unacceptable that artists' studios and places for people to work are living short term to short term. We must be willing to support investment in our cultural capital and our artists by providing them with places to live and places to work.