Vacancy Watch: Amid shiny new towers on St Luke’s Avenue, a vacant council-owned site grows weeds

On Monday morning inside NIDO’s Ardee Point student accommodation block, no one was using the vending machine on the ground floor where you could rent a virtual-reality headset.

But on the mezzanine-like platform raised up above it, a couple sat chatting, looking out the massive windows onto a courtyard and beyond, a brick wall.

Over that wall is a vacant corner lot, owned by Dublin City Council, surrounded on two sides by plywood walls with tatty adverts for the student accommodation, obscured in places by graffiti.

Someone’s written: “Love your city” and then, in a different colour “without Nazis” has been added.

Weeds peek over the tops of the walls at St Luke’s Avenue on one side, and Brabazon Street on the other. This little site – 306 square metres in size – is surrounded by new high-rises.

There are two eight-storey towers of NIDO student accommodation, and across Brabazon Street a 12-storey tower of apartments that is part of the Newmarket Yards development, and a seven-storey Premier Inn hotel.

In 2018, Dublin city councillors vetoed proposals to swap or sell this site to the developer of the student accommodation. For years builders used the site, to help run their construction operations from.

But now the surrounding developments are done and in use. And the site – mostly a cement pad – is empty. Building housing on it wasn’t viable, council managers said in 2018, and putting a park there isn’t either, they said this year.

So what to do with it? “It is now the ugliest feature on St Luke’s Avenue,” former Dublin City Council planner Kieran Rose said on 2 July.

No sale

In 2018, as student accommodation, hotels and short-term lets spread through the Liberties, some councillors pushed back.

Right to Change Councillor Pat Dunne said there was already a “saturation of student accommodation in the area”.

When council managers suggested selling the site on the corner of St Luke’s Avenue and Brabazon Street for €1 million, councillors vetoed that, but countered by suggesting a swap of the site for some social housing.

The developer offered four one-bed apartments, but councillors turned that down too, saying it wasn’t enough.

After the council’s rejection of council managers’ efforts to transfer the site to the developer to become part of what would in time become the Ardee Point student accommodation complex, the council managers said they needed to think about what to do with it instead.

In October 2018, Richard Shakespeare – then the council’s head of planning, and now its chief executive – said there was no concrete plan yet.

“How do we develop that out? Do we do anything with it? You know what I mean. Do we just put grass there?” he said.

In October 2022, in answer to a query from Sinn Féin Councillor Máire Devine, council official, Stephen Coyne, wrote that the site, “which is currently leased as a site office for an adjoining development, will revert to DCC later this year”.

“It is envisaged that a landscaping plan can then be developed for the site to create a small incidental space/ parklet,” he wrote.

No park

But when Devine followed up on that, Coyne replied in February 2024 that “Consideration was being given by the [council’s] South Central Area Office to landscaping this area as a small parklet as a possible resolution of the site.”

With the builders’ “site compound” now disassembled and gone, the council had had a think and decided “the site would not be suitable for planting and would not make a good quality open space”, Coyne’s response to Devine said.

“The site is north-facing, with large gable walls on either side that will see the area largely in shade, and with no overlooking for passive surveillance,” the response says.

Although, trees and other plantings have been put in on the same side of St Luke’s Avenue a few metres east, in front of Newmarket Yards. And windows of a 12-storey tower that’s part of Newmarket Yards overlook the site from just across Brabazon Street.

Coyne also told Devine that a lot of work “would be needed to remove the existing hard surface of the site or to address any archaeology beneath this area”.

“Both of these factors would add considerably to the cost and complexity of any work here. It is therefore prudent to consider whether there are other possible uses for the land,” he wrote.

Rose, the former council planner, said these concerns about the north-facing orientation of the site, the overlooking, the concrete pad, and the archaeology were “just kind of makey-uppey excuses”.

The builders put in the concrete pad, and it is quite possible that under the contract they signed with the council for use of the plot, the council can get them to take out the concrete pad again at their own expense, Rose said.

As for the archaeology, the council has put in allotments at the sensitive archaeological site at St Thomas Abbey, off South Earl Street, using above-ground planters, Rose said.

Why couldn’t they do similar at the St Luke’s Avenue site, which likely hosts less sensitive, more industrial-y remains underground? Rose asked.

A 2019 archaeological assessment submitted as part of a planning application for Ardee Point said that development “is located within the post medieval industrial heart land of Dublin City”.

What then?

Coyne’s February response to Devine said that, given the difficulties of putting a park on the site, the South Central Area office had sent the issue back to the council’s Property Development Section, “to see whether alternative uses can be made of it”.

Says Rose, the former council planner: “It won’t be a priority for the Property Development Section. Now it will just sit there for 10 years and then people will think, ‘Oh no we better do something with it!’”

The council has not responded to a query sent last Thursday about the future of the site, including whether conditions have changed since 2018, making building housing on it now viable.

Or whether the council plans to try again to sell it to a private developer, given votes for that among councillors may have changed over time – after local elections in 2019 and 2024.

Or, if neither of those options are on the table, what then, the site could be used for aside from growing weeds – both in the short-term, and in the long term.

Was it a mistake by councillors not to have made a deal with the developer for the site to be part of the Ardee Point student housing complex?

“I don’t think so,” says Rose. “It could make a very attractive parklet.”

On Monday 1 July, Green Party Councillor Michael Pidgeon said he didn’t know what could be done with the site now.

Maybe, despite what the council has said, there is a way to turn it into a useable park-like space, even if it’s just got a few plants and benches, he said.

“Like the one at Donore Avenue and Cork Street,” Pidgeon said.