Fingal County Council launched a feasibility study in 2017. But the project still requires further study, a spokesperson said this week.
Una O’Connor grew up in Mill Lane, she said Monday.
She’d been up there at her mother’s this past weekend, she said, in west Dublin, south across Liffey from the Farmleigh Estate.
Connecting the two sides of the river here is an old metal truss bridge, built in the late 1800s.
"When I was very young, the walkway [on the bridge] was still there," O’Connor said. "We used to walk on it. It would be a huge feature of anyone's childhood from the area.”
That was true for her parents, and her parents’ parents as well. Her family worked on the Guinness family’s estate: their commute took them across the bridge and back.
Even after the bridge stopped being primarily a way to commute to the estate, it was still well used. That changed in the 1980s, O’Connor said.
She said her dad loved telling this story. “He never stopped talking, to the point where we would tune him out,” she said. “But I do remember that story very distinctly.”
The way he told it, he was going home one night, and “he spotted a couple of guys up on the bridge and they were literally smashing the walkway into the water below”, O’Connor said.
“And yeah, so he literally was, you know, What on earth are you doing? What are you doing?” she said.
He went home, she said, and called people. He was into this stuff, he chatted to councillors, historians, she says.
From her memory, her dad “somehow managed to stop the destruction from going further. But it was too late for the walkway. It was already gone. It was in the water below.”
For many years now, local residents have been advocating for the bridge to be restored and reopened.
A feasibility study was commissioned by South Dublin and Fingal County Councils in 2017 to explore whether the historic bridge, also known as the Silver Bridge, Farmleigh Bridge, or Strawberry Beds Bridge, could be reopened to the public.
But this week, asked about the bridge’s future, a Fingal County Council spokesperson said there was a need for further study.
Paul Corcoran, who has been pushing for years for the bridge to be brought back into use, is frustrated. "I've tried and failed since to find out information about it. No one seems to know what's going on,” he said.
People have been advocating for a long time to bring the bridge back into use, O’Connor said.
It was a big thing for her parents’ generation, but that generation got older. “It's great that someone like Paul is picking up the mantle," she said.
When Corcoran helped launch a “Rebuild the Silver Bridge” campaign in 2010, he said he envisioned a wider greenway stretching across Dublin.
The restored bridge, he says, could be a linchpin in a future Liffey Valley Park. "It would be transformative."
There hasn’t been much progress though. There was the feasibility study, and various councillors and local TDs have raised the issue.
In 2023, Fingal County Council undertook conservation works, repainting and repairing the steel structure at a cost of just under €1.5 million. But there’s still no deck or floor.
People mostly just use it to climb out across, and jump into the river from, says O’Connor.
“Fairly common for groups of teenagers to be jumping off it in the summer,” she says. Not her, she said. “I just, no.”
Mark Sinnott, chair of the Strawberry Beds Residents Association (SBRA), said locals consider the bridge of important heritage value, and “warmly received” the renovation in 2023.
While there’s broad support, in principle, for the bridge to be reopened, residents want to see more clarity and consultation before decisions are made.
"Many tenants and locals are hopeful for chances to engage on any future proposals for the bridge while ensuring that any developments remain sensitive to the distinct character and needs of Strawberry Beds," he said.
Safety and environmental issues are top of mind, Sinnott said. "Residents have expressed concerns that opening the bridge to public access from the Lower Road would pose significant safety risks at this time, given the absence of footpaths, pedestrian crossings, and the limited street lighting along the route.”
They also want to ensure a full environmental impact assessment is carried out, particularly for the wildlife and plant life of the Liffey Valley. Anti-social behaviour is another worry, he said.
The recent conservation works to stabilise and protect the bridge structure itself not only did not include the reinstatement of a bridge deck – they also did not include development of routes to allow public access to the bridge, a Fingal County Council spokesperson said.
“The feasibility of re-establishing a pedestrian link at this location requires consultation and coordination with South Dublin County Council to establish if appropriate lands and access from both the northern and southern sides of the bridge can be provided,” he said.
“Alongside this, further analysis on road safety issues and cost planning is needed to complete this full feasibility study. No timeline is currently available for the completion of the feasibility study for reuse,” he said.
Once all this feasibility study has been done, if the council decided to go forward with reopening the bridge pedestrian route, it would then have to find funding, and sort planning, he said.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
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