Aoife Carrigy Food Critic and Secretary, Irish Food Writers’ Guild
Dublin’s foodscene is in a time warp. Our recent back-to-the-future mini-boom should continue with reduced rents drawing entrepreneurial restaurateurs out of hiding. The challenge of coaxing diners out – particularly midweek – will be met with keenly priced main courses or ‘menu del dia’ offerings. Once there, restaurateurs will hoosh diners’ spend with persuasively delicious starters, clever cocktails and carefully paired craft beers. Ingredients will be sourced even more locally than ever: think rooftop gardens, beehives and chicken runs. Meanwhile the timelag that delayed pop-up restaurants’ arrival to these shores means the sherry bar and food truck revolutions are imminent. We hope.
Garett Pitcher Consultant and Retailer, Indigo and Cloth
In my opinion we are beginning to see the start of an innovation economy. Restraints; be them financial or regulatory eventually lead to more creativity. There is also a generational conflict leading to a split in ideologies and a movement away from the middle. My predictions would be a swarm of creative and indigenous businesses over the next five years. Their relevant success depends on the appetite for change in this country and we may end up with a model of East and West not unlike Berlin or Beirut.
Rick O’Shea Radio Presenter, 2FM
In terms of how people absorb media I can barely scratch the surface of how people in Dublin may use it in the future. Online, mobile online and GPS-centric in particular coming front and centre, obviously. Information will be immediate, radio in particular something you may not access through an actual radio anymore. Then there’ll be the contras, possibly including me. People who find the TMI too much and lock themselves away in quiet rooms lined with books and cups of coffee for the respite.
John Mahon The Bernard Shaw, Twisted Pepper and Bodytonic
In the future Dubliners will be more savvy and demanding when it comes to going out. They will know and have seen more from their travels on the web and in the real world and will expect it on their doorstep. Mediocre will no longer be good enough. They will know what they want and where to get it and they largely will be getting it, as a well travelled generation, forced to be entrepreneurs and think different, creates it for them.
Joseph Kearney Queer Editor and Broadcaster
In the future there will be less divisions between gay and straight communities, there will simply be Dublin with the finance district, student areas, art quarters like Temple Bar and so on. Gay and straight couples will be equally welcome in any bar or restaurant and on snowy wintry days Dubliners will sip hot chocolate on the board walk and remark how weird it was that in 2012 marriage was only for straight men and women and not, as it should be, for everyone, men, women and trans. The airport will remain reassuringly difficult to access.
Abie Philbin Bowman Comedian and Broadcaster
It feels like Ireland is finally waking up to the need for critical, insightful satire on TV… And all it took was clerical child abuse, political corruption and the biggest financial crisis in the history of the State. I’d love to see Ireland produce satire to equal The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Channel 4’s Ten O’Clock Live.Hopefully shows like The Savage Eye and Irish Pictorial Weekly are just the beginning. On the live comedy circuit, I predict we’ll see a peak of 1,500 stand-up comedians and seven comedy clubs.
Jim Carroll Journalist, Irish Times
Just how many musicians live and work in Dublin? When you watch David Simon’s Treme and see its evocative portrayal of New Orleans’ music, you realise we’ve something similar on our doorsteps, yet it’s rarely marked or celebrated bar as hackneyed aural postcards. With fewer conventional ways for musicians to make an honest living, perhaps the true value of the city’s music brigades will be properly assessed in the future. At the very least, from trad-playing hard-chaws to bleep-friendly electronic geezers, there’s at least the makings of a decent TV series in there. Love/Hate, series four: Nidge takes up the banjo.
Dr. Regina Reulbach Commercial Development Manager at CLARITY (Centre for Sensor Web Technologies)
More than 42% of people aged 20 to 39 possess a third level qualification from one of the multiple Dublin universities and colleges such as UCD, DCU, DIT or Trinity (Census 2011). Dubliners will realize that they not only have a younger and well educated population, but educated people with great ideas who are better linked to family, friends and organizations at home and internationally than any other European city. Add growth oriented money, aspirational leaders and the belief in being great together and this will spark new ideas turning into successful businesses. Irish born innovations will fuel the new economic growth, the SmartTiger.
Richard Seabrooke Co-Founder, Offset Festival
I hope the future in Dublin will be all about collaboration. There’s nothing more powerful than good people with good ideas getting together to make them great. For nearly ten years now, we’ve focused on bringing people from different walks of life, interests and parts of the world together with the aim of celebrating original thinking, fostering new approaches and encouraging the amazing things that come of this creative coddling. The more this happens and the more varied the connections, the more interesting life will be around these parts.
Oliver T. Cunningham Proprietor, Wall and Keogh
When we opened our little shop in Portobello there were virtually no dedicated tea shops in Dublin, I’m glad to see that more have opened since, glad because it shows an appetite for variety in our nations brew. Gone are silly expressions like “It’s a long way from… you were raised”. In the future I see much more open minded and inventive thinking in Dublin, be it craft bakeries, Irish fashion and design (which is definitely on the up) or a new breed of great writers and film-makers – all celebrating and being influenced by this wonderful city.
Stevie Russell, Film Director
The introduction of Bio-mechanics will bring about the next step in our evolution. Things that make us move less these days mean we are biologically devolving. So little chips and single cell gizmos will be planted into our body and minds, making us healthier, sounder, easier to love and less likely to kill each other. Cue a long awaited second renaissance that kicks off in Dublin and the world heads into an unprecedented time of growth and wealth. There is a small catch: You can only have one kid and you have to eat your granny.
Simone Rocha Fashion Designer
What I see happening in Dublin in the future, as a Dubliner who has moved away to live in London the past five years, is more expats moving back home, home is where the heart is.
Julia O’Mahony Literary Review
Other than the inevitable emergence of yet more trendy eats places, (Mr. Macken, take note: we’re still holding out for a fish restaurant) it’d be great if there was a reclamation of Georgian Dublin. The offices go unlet, beause they’re not really fit for purpose; let’s have them as homes once more, and stroll to work, because if they really do get around to linking up the Luas lines, driving in the city centre will be hellish. So a lived in Georgian city centre please, and an affordable fish restaurant, with that classic gloomy lighting we find so bizarrely appealing.
Ivana Bacik Senator
My vision of Dublin in the future is of a living, dynamic city centre that is designed around the needs of cyclists and pedestrians and that includes quality residential areas, plenty of open areas and play spaces. I would like our planners to design roads and streets to accommodate cyclists and to encourage both adults and children to walk, cycle and use public transport. On Culture Nights our city centre is transformed as people flock in from the suburbs and families reclaim the streets – let’s make it feel that way all year round.
Willie White Artistic Director, Dublin Theatre Festival
My hope is that the north inner city will be properly regenerated and flourishing after two centuries of neglect and attrition have failed to dampen its spirit and its charm. My wish is that the broken teeth of O’Connell Street will be filled in and that the Carlton and Ambassador, refurbished for live performances, will bring the pavements to life. I look forward to vacant lots overtaken by people and green space, to empty buildings occupied by culture of all kinds and to Georgian architecture standing comfortably alongside contemporary buildings that express the pride of Dubliners in their home town.
Seáneen Sullivan Proprietor, L. Mulligan. Grocer, W. J. Kavanagh’s, and the Brown Paper Bag Project
I believe that Dublin will always to some extent dictate its own story. The city has a memory and is almost sentient at times, prompting forgotten passions in long deserted corners, reigniting food production where it had extinguished, history repeating itself, but always with a new twist in the tale. Sourdough baked in converted warehouses, honey from bees that live in the Strawberry Beds, beers brewed onsite in licensed premises, the revival of curing and smoking, community gardens nestled on the ends of terraced rows: this is the future of food in Dublin, written by people that live and breathe their craft.
Regan Huitchins Culture File
Whatever happened to the City Quays Project? I’m looking forward to the time when Dublin’s quays are once more the heart of the city rather than its lungs. There will be cafés, bookshops, the Smock Alley and Abbey theatres, beautiful bridges, elegant walls, restaurants, historic buildings, the new docklands, walkways. So, we need to do a little joined-up thinking. The plans were drawn 350 years ago. If we could only look on the Liffey with the old Duke of Ormonde’s eyes, we’d soon be living splendidly along the river the way Parisians, Budapestens or Corkonians do.
Colin Harmon Barista and Proprietor, 3FE
Rental space for food and drink use in Dublin has always been scarce and, as a consequence, quite expensive. Tangible goods are cheaper on the internet so I can see more space in the city becoming available for non-tangible, consumable and experience-lead businesses. Planning authorities will have to free up more space for restaurants, cafes, bars and entertainment venues to replace the traditional high street shops that can’t compete with the Amazons and Tescos of this world. Dublin is known as an engaging place but I think we’re seeing the beginning of the new city as a recreational destination.
Jarlath Regan Comedian
Ten years from now I predict standup comedy in Dublin will be like “Spinning” is today. Most people will have taken a class at least once and decided never to put themselves through it again. Others will opt to buy the equivalent of a “home gym” called a “home stage” where you can perform in the privacy of your own gaff. There’ll be the less strenuous “Comedy Hero” available on the Xbox. It’ll be like “Guitar Hero” except with a mic and Michael McIntyre routines. Apart from that I’d say it’ll be the same with more jokes about hover boards.
Fergal McCarthy Visual, Installation and Performance Artist
The future of Dublin: a return to the past. The inner city will again become a desirable place to live – once it is rebuilt with hundreds of blocks of family-sized apartments featuring state of the art green technology. This retro futurism will also feature bicycles and lots of them, inner city parks and a re-orientation of the city towards the river and the sea. Carbon neutral and car free, the city centre will once again become Dublin’s beating heart.
