After eighteen years working within the community in Ringsend, Joe Grennell is more equipped than most to speak of his time there.

Speaking to me from his new offices on Ormond Quay Dublin where he works as an Educational Co Coordinator, Joe told me of his time in Ringsend where he witnessed many changes and made many close friends and associates.

“The Ringsend Community Training Workshop successfully made an application to the Department of Social Welfare, as it was then known, for funding to do work on anti-poverty issues within the area and I subsequently got the job as Manager of the Ringsend Action Project (RAP).

“The idea at the time was to look at ways in which we could intervene in the locality, which was considered at that time to be a disadvantaged area.”

During his time with RAP Joe and his colleagues identified a number of issues which they decided required immediate attention. “One of them was that it was almost impossible for a young person or a married couple who were working, to live in the area because Dublin City Council hadn’t built houses in the area since 1986. This was 1990 and in 1992 we built the very first affordable houses ever to be built in the state,” says Joe with a hint of pride.

“We built seventeen houses and we sold them to local people for £41,000. We got a small group of people together, made up of myself, Ruairí Quinn and Charlie Murphy. We discovered that there was a piece of land for sale at the time in Ringsend and we contacted a developer and said this is what we want to do, we want to do this by the book and we want to buy this land and sell the houses.

“The Shared Ownership Scheme was just being introduced and six people bought their houses on that scheme and they were the first ever to use the scheme. After that, we went on to build another six houses in 1996, another seventeen houses and five apartments in 1996 and established the City Housing Initiative.

“Another problem we noticed,” continues Joe, “was that people in the area who were on low incomes and in need of money for Christmas could not approach the banks for £200 or £500. The banks just wouldn’t lend them that, so they were going to loan sharks. They couldn’t go to credit unions because they had no savings in there so we established the Money, Advice and Budgeting Service which was one of the first branches set up in Ireland and is now active throughout the country.

“For years Ringsend had a drug problem. We were running a youth project at the time and we noticed that when the kids were playing in the park or around the area they were coming across needles. We got together a group of people and called ourselves the Ringsend and District Response to Drugs and that organisation is now flourishing in Ringsend and works from the Spellman Centre.

“We also ran the Childcare Club and found that there was a low level of education according to the current census population, 29% of the population had left school with their Junior Cert. We had a whole wide range of interests and my job was to manage all these interests and RAP now has eleven people employed. All in all, people working together in the area have achieved an enormous amount.”

The burning question, having achieved so much, why did Joe leave? “Well I just felt it was time for a change and my new job in the Dublin Inner City Partnership means that I’m working as an Educational Co-ordinator here and in actual fact I still have connection with Ringsend through education.”

Ringsend, is never far from the heart of this Glasnevin man and he remains close to its roots. “Ringsend has a very rich community spirit and is a close-knit village. One of the first things I did was to negotiate for Ringsend to be included in the Dublin Inner City area.

“You always get the feeling when you go into Ringsend that you’re going into a village. Most people socialise in the village and everybody knows everybody and that’s the way I think it should be. Everybody is related to everybody else. I have seen enormous and positive changes in Ringsend over the years.”