NEW ON-STREET PUBLIC toilets planned for Dublin city centre will likely only be open during daytime “retail” hours, despite multiple councillors calling for the facilities to be made available on a 24/7 basis.

In a discussion that lasted over 40 minutes at a Dublin City Council meeting this evening, two dozen councillors spoke about the need to improve access to public toilets in Dublin city centre.

Many were disappointed with aspects of a recent report on the matter by the council’s executive manager, which Councillor Daithí Doolan said could have done more to propose “solutions”.

Councillor Rachel Batten said there is “something seriously wrong within Dublin City Council in that we can’t provide basic facilities within the city and I do think we need to be a little bit more imaginative in how we do it”.

The report details how the cubicles outside St Stephen’s Green are the only on-street public toilets available in Dublin city and how a market consultation seeking submissions for partners to manage new public toilets attracted little commercial interest.

The report included a list of toilets located within buildings operated by Dublin City Council that are available for public use. It also used the privately-owned website “pee.ie” to compile a list of toilets in locations like shopping centres, cultural buildings and service stations.

The council is planning to install new public toilets on O’Connell Street, Smithfield Square, South King Street and Barnardo Square by mid-2026.

These would likely only be open during daytime hours and could charge users a 50 cent fee.

The total cost of the project is expected to reach around €5.7 million. 

At this evening’s meeting, councillors raised questions and concerns in relation to the report and the current plans for increasing on-street public toilets in the city centre.

Several said they believed the toilets should be free rather than carrying any charge and that they should operate 24 hours a day to open up access for people who are homeless and people in the city for nightlife.

Access to the toilets for people with illnesses or disabilities was also raised, with the suggestion that there should be a normalised system of allowing priority access for people with conditions that mean quick access to such facilities is required. 

Councillors questioned why the cost of the project was foreseen to be so high and whether the cost could be brought down by selling space for commercial advertisements on the units.

Many said that awareness of existing toilets that can be used by the public is low in some cases and said there should be an advertising or social media campaign, or signage outside of buildings, alerting people to locations where public toilets are available inside buildings.

Responding to councillors’ concerns, manager Richard Shakespeare said the toilets will be “used day in, day out” and will need “cleaners there constantly servicing them” and potentially security staff.

He said those costs are factored into the council’s estimates but that ultimately “we have to go for procurement for this and the market will tell us what the cost of doing this is”.

“Look, the hours of operation – what we’re looking at at the moment is retail hours,” he said.

“In general, people who are in town for the night-time economy are in a bar, a restaurant, a venue, a theatre – there are toilets in all of those facilities.

“If we’re going to open these up 24 hours a day, the [cost] numbers I’m talking about here are going to quadruple for management.

“They need to be cleaned, so it’s going to get more expensive [if they're open for longer].”

On raising awareness about existing toilets, Shakespeare said: “We will talk to the press office on advertising the locations of where they are. Social media, that’s very easily done.

“But I don’t think we’ll be going down the road of a proliferation of signs around the city indicating where every toilet is, but we can certainly look at what easy options are available,” he continued.  

He said that CCTV could be potentially considered for security needs but that it would raise issues in relation to privacy and data protection 

He said management could “certainly look at” facilitating priority access for people with c certain illnesses.

There were 60 on-street public toilets available in Dublin city centre in the 1970s, but this figure dropped to zero by the end of the 1990s and remained at zero until 2020.

Temporary toilet units were installed outside St Stephen’s Green and on Wolfe Tone Street (later relocated on Ryder’s Row) in March 2020 while businesses and the bathrooms within them were closed.

The St Stephen’s Green unit, which contains seven toilet cubicles, is still in place, though the Ryder’s Row unit was removed in 2022 “due to low usage, high costs, and anti-social complaints”.

Both units experienced peak levels of use during the summers of 2020 and 2021, with around 23,000 visits in total per week.

That later fell to around 1,800 visits per week to the St Stephen’s Green unit by the end of 2022 after business had resumed as normal following the removal of Covid-19 restrictions.