Council to kick off consultation on masterplan with sports pitch at Marrowbone Lane

Dublin City Council is to kick off a public consultation on a masterplan for lands at Marrowbone Lane, a council official said on Wednesday.

At the moment, the 4 hectare site holds a bunch of municipal depots – a recently vacated lighting depot, a water depot, and a sewage depot – and is right next to the St Catherine’s Community Sports Centre.

“What we’re trying to do is three things,” said Jamie Cudden, an executive manager in corporate services and transformation, as he ran through a presentation on the masterplan, at a meeting of the council’s South Central Area Committee.

One aim is to modernise and consolidate the depots so some services can stay, Cudden said. 

Other aims are to align a new multi-use sports facility with St Catherine’s and to create better connections across the area, he said. 

Now, after internal council discussions, and discussions with some outside groups, they’re ready to put the masterplan out to consultation, he said. “Particularly around the community use.”

People will be able to weigh in online and at four drop-in sessions at St Catherine’s, he said.

J.J. O’Mahoney, chair of the Sporting Liberties campaign, said it was very welcome to see the site’s development reach this next step – and move closer to realising a full-size sports pitch on the site as they have long campaigned for.

Councillors had really worked and pulled at levers for years to keep the idea of a full-size sports pitch as a priority on the agenda, he said – and he wanted to recognise that.

He had been encouraged, he said, to see interest from the council’s chief executive, Richard Shakespeare, since he arrived in that post in late 2023. “It’s a breath of fresh air to see people recognise the challenges that the children of this area face.”

Now, though, speed of delivery is key – as kids in the area don’t have the time to wait, he said. “I think it’s imperative that we move this along as quickly as possible.”

A back-and-forth

The future of the site, which sits south of Marrowbone Lane and west of Summer Street South, has been a point of contention for years between councillors and local sporting groups, and council managers.

In November 2022, during a debate on the city development plan, councillors voted to rezone the site as open space. 

It was an effort to force officials to sit up and take notice of their wish for a big sports pitch alongside the plans for a renewed council depot, they said.

Officials had been pursuing their own plans for a new smaller depot, 100 homes, and two smaller practice pitches. 

The council’s executive hadn’t been happy when councillors rezoned it and in doing so put the brakes on that, said Michael Pidgeon, a Green Party councillor, at the Wednesday meeting.

“I remember getting some fairly nasty texts from council management saying, ‘Oh, you're burning your bridges now, and all this,’” he said.

But they stuck with it, he said, and councillors will keep that “frankly ridiculous” zoning which they put in place, until they are convinced that the pitch that the community wants and needs will be built there.

The fact that the site is zoned as open space for now means the council executive can’t build a new depot, or housing on it. 

So they’ll need to get councillors on-side by including an agreed pitch in their plans, before the site can be rezoned again and redeveloped. 

Essentially, the councillors are holding the site hostage, because they can rezone land but the council executive can’t.

At the meeting, Pidgeon asked Cudden what happens next in the process towards redeveloping the site. “What’s the objective of the consultation?” he said. What comes after people have fed in? 

The consultation should start during the week of 29 September and wrap up at the end of October, said Cudden’s presentation. Sporting and residents’ groups would be offered one-to-one meetings if needed, it says.

After the consultation, the plan was to  go back to senior council managers, said Cudden. “This will need their agreement and attention.”

The project team has already heard some feedback, he said, including that the sports facility must be multi-purpose. “It can’t just be dedicated to one sport discipline.”

Labour Councillor Darragh Moriarty, meanwhile, asked about funding. There isn’t anything in the council’s capital plan – its budget for building things – right now to build this, he said. 

“I'm just wondering around drawing down the funding or allocating the funding for this project,” he said.

There’s no money for it right now, said Cudden at the meeting. 

So this consultation and masterplan process is important to bring it back to the council’s senior managers, he said, “and have that conversation between, I suppose, the councillors and the city management team in terms of where it goes”.