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Case Studies  Urban Regeneration in the City of Dublin: Partnership structures and integrated area planning
Integrated Services Project
A second major initiative which has impacted on the study neighbourhoods is the Integrated Services project (ISP), a central government initiative. The concept of the IAP was already well advanced within Dublin City Council when the ISP was implemented across the study neighbourhoods. This project comprised of a set of pilot schemes established by central government in a number of deprived localities around Ireland in 1998. The Integrated Services Project was designed to “develop new procedures to ensure a more focused and better co-ordinated response by the statutory authorities to the needs of communities with the greatest levels of disadvantage, as a basis for a model of best practice”.
The pilot schemes were set up to explore ways of getting public social service in deprived areas to co-ordinate their services and co-operate in finding solutions to local problems. They were conceived of in response to what was seen as a major source of inefficiency in public social services, namely, that a particular deprived area or household could be the target of possibly dozens of different social services or interventions without those services being aware of each other or making an effort to co-ordinate their work.
Examples of Integrated Services Projects
The Dublin 8 Integrated Services Process included the four flat complexes of Dolphin House, Fatima Mansions, St. Michael’s Estate and St. Teresa’s Gardens. One of the objectives of the Action Plan of the ISP was to maximise access to services for people in the ISP area and to increase their uptake of services.
A co-ordinating structure was set up in the North East Inner City with all the agencies in the area to help deliver multi-agency solutions to the problems. These agencies were the City Council, Northern Area Health Board, Fás, Probation & Welfare, Youth Services and Garda Síochana. The ISP set out social inclusion tasks, which required all agencies to implement multi-agency solutions. |
The presence of these two initiatives (the Canal Communities Partnership and the ISP) in the Kilmainham-Inchicore area means that there was a relatively high degree of regenerative activity underway prior to the adaptation of the Integrated Area Plan. However, the highly targeted nature of these activities (in keeping with the area based approach from which it arises) means that they have been very heavily directed at St. Michael’s estate, the most deprived sub area in Kilmainham, rather that at the larger neighbourhood of Kilmainham/Inchicore. In fact, the Canal Communities partnership, which provides the basis organisation framework of both initiatives, has a complex relationship with the general Kilmainham area. It tends to focus very much on deprived housing estates within the area- St Michael’s in Kilmainham and Fatima Mansions and Dolphin’s Barn in nearby Rialto- The partnership and the integrated services pilot project takes only limited note of the areas surrounding those three estates, (Fahey, 2000).
Area based partnerships  The RAPID programme
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