Vacancy Watch: The site in front of the National Centre for the Circular Economy in Ballymun

On Ballymun’s Main Street, in front of the Rediscovery Centre, which teaches people about the circular economy, lies a disused, vacant site – land that also needs to be recycled.

The vacant lot, known as Site 7, is surrounded by hoarding, which blocks the view of the old Boiler House – now home to the Rediscovery Centre, which is the National Centre for the Circular Economy – from the main road.

Last week, local area councillors on the North West Area Committee passed a motion calling on the council to work with the centre to come up with a plan to bring Site 7 back into use.

Thousands of children come from all over Ireland to visit the Rediscovery Centre, said Fianna Fáil Councillor Keith Connolly in his motion. Yet, “this site seriously detracts from the centre and from the main street of Ballymun”.

In a response to Connolly’s motion, Jackie O’Reilly, a senior executive officer with Dublin City Council, said the site is tied up in a legal dispute with Bennett Construction, which is “a legacy case from the Ballymun Regeneration project”.

“It is very valuable land that could be used for housing or to extend the Rediscovery Centre,” says Connolly by phone on Monday. “We are pushing for it to be resolved as soon as possible.”

The council didn’t respond in time for publication to queries about the nature of the legal dispute, but in her response to the motion, O’Reilly said “the settlement is nearing the final stages that will see the site taken back in charge by DCC once completed”.

The site is one of 31 plots – many vacant or underused due to the legacies of past approaches to planning –  that was flagged seven years ago in the local area plan for Ballymun as suitable for redevelopment.

What is happening with the site?

Site 7 is 0.1 ha, according to the council’s 2017 Ballymun local area plan.

While a lot of the land in Ballymun is council-owned, this site was privately owned, according to the local area plan, and zoned for commercial or mixed-use development.

“The site is suitable for a high density, mixed use development and should tie into the existing Plaza development and the Main Street in terms of height and design,” the plan says.

The council is working towards putting a plan in place for the site, once the legal dispute is resolved, says O’Reilly.

The council is working with the Rediscovery Centre and the residents to come up with solutions, she says.

Gráinne Lambert, director of the Rediscovery Centre, says Site 7 has been vacant since before the centre moved into the Boiler House building in 2014.

Dublin City Council has been in regular contact, she says, “to reassure us that they are proactively trying to find a resolution and that they are hopeful that they will soon have possession of it.”

“The Rediscovery Centre is very keen to see that the site is taken back into possession by Dublin City Council and we are really hopeful that this will be achieved in the near future” says Lambert.

Bennett Construction didn’t respond to queries regarding whether it is the owner and if so if it has plans for the site.

O’Reilly also said that in the last year the council spent €11,450 on maintenance and limiting unauthorised access to the site.

Connolly, the Fianna Fáil councillor, says that that cost to the taxpayer is not acceptable. “It’s been left on the long finger so that is very frustrating.”

On vacancy in Ballymun

There is a lot of vacant land in Ballymun, most of which is owned by Dublin City Council, says Andrew Montague, a community planner, former Labour councillor, and author of the “Ballymun: a Brighter Future” report.

The high-rise flats of Ballymun were originally designed to be surrounded by fields, he says.

“They had a romantic notion that you build high-rise but it would be like living in the countryside, or surrounded by parkland,” he says, but instead “it all ended up being wasteland”.

While Ballymun was a high-rise development, because there was so much empty land around the tower blocks, overall the area was less densely populated than the surrounding housing estates, says Montague.

That, coupled with the fact that the residents were on low incomes, meant that businesses couldn’t survive there.

The flats were knocked in between 2004 and 2015, as part of a planned regeneration of the area.

One of the goals of the regeneration was to bring all the vacant land into use, Montague says.

The council originally owned most of the land in Ballymun, he says, which it transferred into a council-owned company called Ballymun Regeneration Ltd.

The plan was that in Phase 1 the council would build houses for the people living in the flats to move into before they were knocked, says Montague.

Then in Phase 2, it would knock the flats and sell the land to private developers to build private housing, he says.

The Ballymun Regeneration Company did sell some land, but then there was the economic crash of 2007, he says.

After that, most private developers weren’t interested in Ballymun, he says, so when the regeneration company was wound up in 2014 most of the land then reverted back to the council, says Montague. “Most of that land is still vacant to this day.”

“That sliver might be in private ownership, but the land in Ballymun is overwhelmingly owned by Dublin City Council,” he says.