Amid national shortage of childcare places, developer in Donabate asks to scrap planned crèche

As the train crossed the Malahide estuary on Monday afternoon, passengers entering Donabate were met by the sight of multiple active construction sites.

To the east of the tracks is the vast Corballis East development where Aledo Donabate Limited is building 1,365 homes.

Just south of the station, cranes towered above thickets of evergreen trees and housing estates.

Across the railway, west of Corballis, temporary steel fences stood along the Hearse Road, cordoning off a large block of apartments that were nearing completion.

They formed part of the Semple Woods neighbourhood, a large-scale residential development which is set to eventually consist of 351 homes and possibly two crèches.

The first of these crèches was included in a planning application to build 196 houses and 62 apartments by developer McGarrell Reilly Homes, which Fingal County Council approved in January 2018.

That crèche was built, local Labour Councillor Corina Johnston said on Monday morning. But “it hasn’t been opened yet.”

Inside the new estate, families have already moved into many of the homes with dozens of cars parked in the driveways that lead out onto the winding streets, each with a name like The Court, The Place, and The Walk.

But, within the neighbourhood, there is a patch of land, and according to a planning application located at the entrance to the estate, this particular spot was slated for further development.

Its applicant, Stephen Barry was seeking permission from Fingal County Council to amend an existing approval to build 16 homes, four flats and a childcare facility.

Specifically, Barry’s application was asking to drop what could be the neighbourhood’s second crèche in favour of two more houses.

Barry didn’t comment when emailed to ask why he had applied to exclude the facility from the forthcoming development.

But an analysis carried out by consultant Thornton O’Connor Town Planning argued that the crèche that is already set to be built in the Semple Woods housing estate would be capable of meeting the demand for spaces locally.

It’s a conclusion that has caused a good deal of anger though, Johnston says, because parents in the neighbourhood are already struggling to find adequate childcare for their kids in Donabate. 

“Parents are sending their children to crèches in Swords, which isn’t ideal, because it’s out of the way,” she says. 

Supply and demand

Developer Stephen Barry had, on 30 January, received permission from the council to build 22 homes and a crèche on the lands within Semple Woods.

The childcare facility wasn’t in this original application that he submitted, however. As a condition of the planning permission, the council required Barry to omit two homes and build a crèche instead.

This crèche at this location should be capable of making up the shortfall of childcare places in the Semple Woods estate, the council’s planning conditions said, noting that Barry’s facility would need to have a minimum of 24 places for children.

But, in Barry’s application to amend the existing permission, a planning report prepared by consultants Thornton O’Connor Town Planning said that childcare demands can be accommodated by the permitted Semple Woods residential development.

The current 351 homes permitted, under construction, or proposed in Semple Wood require 85 crèche places, according to the council’s 30 January planning report.

The crèche in Semple Wood is intended to provide spaces for 61 children. The crèche that Barry was conditioned to deliver would cover the shortfall of 24 places, the report says.

But Thornton O’Connor carried out an analysis of Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures and families moving into the estate, and concluded that the Semple Woods development would likely generate demand for just 22 crèche places, the consultants wrote in their report, included in Barry’s July application.

As such, there was no need for an additional childcare facility to be delivered at the site on Barry’s development, they said.

Johnston, the Labour councillor, still thinks the crèche should be included in the development though.

“We’ve already got a situation where parents in Semple Woods have no crèche built, and had to enroll their children outside Donabate, and others are unable to source crèches in the area,” she says.

Waiting lists

One of the issues that developers can have with providing crèches in estates is the actual feasibility of running them, Johnston says. “Childcare providers say these smaller ones are not financially viable.”

Still, removing the crèche from the planning application is unjustifiable, Johnston says.  “We have a serious issue in Donabate already with a lack of childcare places.”

Pent-up demand for childcare spaces isn’t an issue exclusive to Donabate either.

Councillors and crèche staff over in Lusk said, in April 2024, that the number of facilities weren’t growing to keep up with the town’s needs, with one facility manager saying she had to close her waiting list, because there were 280 names on it.

According to data from Pobal, the organisation that administers early-years programmes, over 2023 and 2024, 19,764 children ages one and two, and 19,373 children ages two and three were on crèche waiting lists across the country.

Of those, 1,038 children in Fingal were on a waiting list, the data shows.

The only way to alleviate this is for the state to provide a lot more publicly-funded childcare facilities, Johnston says. “We have a serious issue here with a lack of not-for-profit childcare facilities in the Fingal area.”

Currently, there are 15 childcare services operating in community facilities across Fingal, serving almost 500 kids, a council spokesperson said on Tuesday. That’s a decrease. 

Johnston says her hope is that the council won’t grant Barry permission to exclude the crèche from his development.