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Unfortunately, these yield figures don’t reveal the true balance sheets of many of the owners of Dublin city centre properties, such as large pension funds or other financial institutions. For these types of landlords, yields can be much higher because scale implies their costs are much lower. Also, because they are long-term investors with bundles of prime property — with in some cases a 30-year horizon and in others, longer — they do not constantly have to assess the logic of each property. This implies that such landlords don’t have to react with any urgency to vacant premises and might prefer to sit on a property rather than accept lower rents. The lower the rent, the lower the overall value of the property, and therefore landlords like this might be happy to retain the boarded-up property instead of crystalising a new lower price in their portfolio. The implication for the city is that vacant lots can remain vacant for a long time before the umbilical cord between commercial retail reality, rents and the landlord’s decisions are cut. This could leave large parts of the prime centre city vacant.

For the city, the paradox of aggregation in economics comes into effect. This is where what is good for the individual is not always good for the collective. For the individual landlord keeping the units vacant might be better than cutting the rent. But this means that rents remain artificially high, elbowing out prospective tenants who might want to open shop but need to have rents that are consistent with today’s post-pandemic footfall, not priced to a 2019 world that has gone, maybe forever. We know footfall is down, and a recent KPMG study of Irish consumer behaviour found that “52 per cent believe it is easier to buy products online than in-store” while “one in three Irish consumers say they’re more likely to purchase products online over the next 12 months”. These trends are, perhaps obviously, more pronounced amongst the young.

So what are the chances of Dublin ever returning to the city of Bloom: a rich tapestry of urban life, constantly evolving? Only lower rents can make urban life affordable. This is where a site tax on all sites needs to be implemented immediately. Property is an asset and only property that is used generates economic benefit. Vacancy and dereliction sap economic energy. To penalise vacancy, all sites need to be taxed whether they are used or not. This makes it expensive to leave sites or buildings idle. At a stoke, such a tax would force landlords into generating an income, no matter how small, from their idle property. As property comes back into use, rents will fall across the entire spectrum of property that is vacant. Grafton Street is only the posh end of a blight that afflicts the whole city.

Isn’t it bizarre that the city Irish tourism will celebrate next Thursday on Bloomsday is being destroyed by the very policies the same Irish State is implementing. Joyce’s imperfect, deeply human Dublin, the city that Bloom strolled to avoid going home least he witness his wife Molly in his bed with her lover Blazes Boylan, is practically gone. But with a little vision, and some joined up thinking, it could rise again. One hundred years after the publication of Ulysses, isn’t it about time we started loving Dublin again?