Dublin Central By Election: Is the Inner City Primed for Migration Backlash?

Dublin Central will go to the polls on 22 May to elect one TD, following the vacancy left by Paschal Donohoe. The official notice of poll lists fourteen candidates, including Malachy Steenson, standing as a non-party candidate, alongside PSF (officially listed on the ballot as “Sinn Féin”), Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Labour, the Social Democrats, People Before Profit, Aontú, the Greens, Gerry Hutch and other independents. 

On paper, it is one of the most politically crowded contests in the country. In practice, however, the by-election seems to be turning on a smaller number of simple questions: who can afford to live in Dublin, who is being listened to and whether the existing political class retains any credibility among those most exposed to the city’s decline.

Speaking briefly to The Burkean on his way to the March for Life in Dublin, Councilor Malachy Steenson said the three biggest issues coming up on the doors in Dublin Central were “the cost of living, housing and immigration.” It is a familiar enough triad in Irish politics by now, but in Dublin Central it takes on a particularly concrete form. This is not a constituency where housing can be discussed as an abstraction. The crisis is visible at street level. Steenson pointed especially to boarded-up and derelict properties in the constituency.

He cited Hardwicke Street as an example, saying: “While canvassing Hardwicke Street, we saw about ten properties that were boarded up. On nearly every block in this constituency there are at least two vacant properties.” 

He argued that the problem was not merely the existence of derelict buildings, but the failure to return usable housing to public use quickly: “There are properties that have been left derelict for years. When a unit of public housing is vacant, it should be put back into supply within a couple of weeks, but that’s not what’s happening.” I made a subsequent visit to Hardwicke Street and confirmed that there were indeed at least ten visibly boarded-up and seemingly vacant properties.

That detail matters. Hardwicke Street is not a remote rural lane nor a forgotten backroad hidden far away from Kildare Street. It sits in the heart of Dublin, within walking distance of the institutions, NGOs, media offices and political class who speak endlessly about housing while entire streets bear the marks of abandonment. 

In Dublin Central, dereliction does not merely offend the eye, it becomes a political argument. Every boarded-up doorway becomes a rebuke to a system that speaks endlessly about housing while failing to return usable buildings to public life.

Asked whether the younger Malachy Steenson would be surprised by his current politics or by the voters now responding to him, he said “Not at all. I’m saying the exact same things now that I’ve always said.” The implication was clear: Steenson does not see himself as having moved so much as the political world around him having shifted.

That may be the most revealing part of his candidacy. Steenson’s claim is not merely that the left has failed on policy, but that it has ceased to be rooted in the people it once claimed to represent. 

He argued that “today many on the left are more concerned about Gaza and Ukraine than about what’s happening in our own country.” He continued: “I have my own views on both issues, but the priority should be to fix the problems in our own country first before being concerned with what’s happening elsewhere.”

This lands on old terrain in Dublin Central, a constituency long associated with working-class communities, renters, public housing tenants and those living closest to the failures of successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments. 

If those voters conclude that the left is more comfortable speaking about distant causes than boarded-up houses on their own streets, then its moral authority begins to crack. Hutch may express a rawer protest vote, but Steenson is attempting to give that anger a clearer and more ideological form.