Fabrizia Development lodged a planning application with Dublin City Council on 14th of October 2004 for a massive mixed-use development on the former Allied Irish Bank sports grounds to the back of the former Irish Glass Bottle factory in Ringsend.

The application is both for apartments and office development, which consists of 780 housing units, in 10 blocks, of 6 to 8 stories high on top of two storey over ground car parking space. On top of this there will be ancillary works on the roof level.

A further 220,000 square feet of offices is proposed for six blocks of seven to eight storey buildings. There is also an inclusion of shops, restaurants and a créche.

The application also has provision for almost 1000 car parking spaces in the development. It also appears to include part of the causeway and the strand at Sandymount as part of this development.

Liam Carroll purchased the site in 1999 from AIB for 31million euro. In the year 2000 an application was lodged by the developer Fabrizia for a similar large development on this site.

In the meantime Liam Carroll’s company has two planning applications lodged with Dublin City Council for the same site.

The Carroll group of companies include Zoe Developments, who has been developing the former gasworks site at South Lotts for the past number of years.

The application lodged for the Poolbeg site in the year 2000 showed that bore hole tests taken on the site produced evidence of contamination. This was not surprising as the site in question is formed from landfill, which was created by the Municipal Dump, which remained open up to the 1970s.

In more recent times illegal dumping has occurred on this site through the removal of soil from the site of the former gasworks at Barrow Street, which was illegally dumped on the site over the past fifteen months. DCC waste enforcement section is reviewing this situation at present.

At a meeting of the South East Area committee of DCC held on 8th of November, the entire committee decided to recommend to the Planning Department that this development should be rejected. The main reason was that this application pre-empts the 2006 Dublin City Development Plan, which is in its draft form at present and may recommend some change of zoning on the site.

The area is at present zoned for industrial use and recreation use only. There was no appropriate information as to the location or number of social or affordable units, which would have to be included under part 5 of the Planning Act.

The cost to remediate the land/soil on this site would make the units very expensive. The infrastructure in the immediate area could not cope with another 2000-plus car journeys per day.
This would be on top of the DCC plan to site an Incinerator on Poolbeg, which would involve 500 to 600 truck journeys per day.

There is no public transport service available in the immediate area. Also, any development on the Poolbeg area may be prone to flooding through increased sea levels due to global warming and climate change.

The Planning application Number for this latest development is 4996/04. Lets hope that this application does not take almost five years without a decision being made by the Planning Department of DCC!