Plans to knock down apartments in the Liberties in Dublin and replace them with a new hotel risk leaving locals with “nowhere to live”, the Secretary of the Local Residents Association has claimed. 

Catherine McSweeney says that the area has several hotels already and that student accommodation is also used for short lets in the summer as well. 

“There’s an absolute huge volume of tourist accommodation and they’re still building more of it,” she told Lunchtime Live. 

“I think we have enough [hotels] and that’s for definite.”

The latest Daft.ie report revealed that rents in Ireland have soared by an additional 13.7% in just a year and Ms McSweeney said the area needs housing more than it needs hotels. 

“Where are all the people that are going to work in these hotels and restaurants and cafés going to live?” she said. 

“There’s nowhere for them to live at the minute. 

“Either the hotels are going to build their own student accommodation or other people will have nowhere to live.”

A skyline view over the Liberties.

The cost of hotel stays was a regular topic of discussion on Newstalk last year with many people feeling that hoteliers were ripping them off. 

Michael Lennon, Director of the Skylon Hotel, said capital city needs more hotel capacity to keep up with demand from tourists. 

“Dublin is one of the highest occupied [cities for] hotels in Europe,” he said. 

“We don’t have the highest rates - Paris, Barcelona, Rome and London have higher rates than us. 

“I think we have about 22,000 odd rooms in Dublin. 

“You talk about the match on Saturday, 40,000 French people over and we’ve only 22,000 bedrooms.”

Main image: A hotel under construction. Picture by: Alamy.com