Dublin city centre’s only public toilets, installed at the top of Grafton Street five years ago, are to be shut.

Dublin City Council said they have decided to remove the facility – which costs almost €400,000 a year to operate - due to reduced demand of 1,500 users per week.

This means there will be no public toilets available in Ireland’s capitol city.

Sean Duignan from Healthmatic, a company which design, install and maintain toilets for Councils across the UK and Ireland, told Lunchtime Live that there are ways to cover the costs of such facilities.

“For example, in London we paid for a toilet that we covered the capitol of and in return we would add on a kiosk, or we would put on a tourist information pad, we would put advertising on it,” he said.

“We can cover the cost of all the toilets while providing safe, clean toilets accessible seven days a week that will not be a burden or a cost to the Council.

“I think what public toilets need now is a bit of a new thinking, moving them into the 21st century.”

Brightly coloured public toilet doors. Image: Stephen Barnes NI / Alamy. 15 July 2013

Alice Leahy, founder of the Alice Leahy Trust, which provides social and health services for people who are homeless, said the situation is “absolutely shocking”.

“I think the city badly needs properly run, properly supervised toilets all over the city,” she said.

“You see an awful lot of services have been offloaded and it means that the Council isn’t there now providing these toilets themselves.”

Ms Leahy also questioned how the Council calculated that 1,500 people per week were using the Grafton Street facility.

Main image: People queuing to use the public toilets beside St Stephens Green in Dublin, 29-03-2021. Image: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews