Councillors push council to fix up Howth railway station forecourt

It’s time to move forward with a redesign of the forecourt of the Howth railway station, Green Party Councillor David Healy said. 

“It’s an area which serves a very large number of tourists coming in,” he said.

He tabled a motion at Wednesday’s meeting of the council’s Howth-Malahide area committee, that it reaffirm “its recommendation of May 2022 that the redesign of the forecourt of Howth Railway Station be included in the Capital Programme”.  

Back in 2022, the area committee had agreed to ask Chief Executive AnnMarie Farrelly to include a redesign of Howth Station’s forecourt in its capital programme – its multi-year budget for one-off projects.

But it was a piece of work that had been identified by councillors as far back as 2020 as being necessary, said Healy.

A temporary bus stop was installed there, he said. “We’ve got a strange jagged little footpath between the concrete and the tarmac, and overall, we still have a confusing area where people need to drop off passengers to the station.”

There isn’t an identified taxi rank either, he said. “We have a need for loading bays to serve a number of businesses.”

This piece of land was the property of Iarnród Eireann, the council said in their May 2022 report, with many of the improvements proposed under the direction of the National Transport Authority.

Healy, at Wednesday’s meeting said the NTA would agree to fund the work needed to design the area correctly, including a bus shelter and taxi rank. “So this is something we should be doing that the NTA says that they’ll fund.”

However, Patricia Cadogan, a senior planner in the council’s Planning and Strategic Infrastructure Department, said the redesign has proven to be more complex than expected due to the matter of land ownership.

The public road is the charge of the council, and the area in front of the station is owned by Córas Iompair Éireann, the semi-state body in charge of public transport, Cadogan said.

But the ownership of the area where the bus stop is located is unregistered, she said.

Currently, a framework plan is being prepared for Howth, Cadogan said at the meeting. This plan “is best placed for consideration of an improved public realm at Howth Station”.

The response doesn’t make any sense because a framework plan isn’t suitable for the redesign of a small area outside a train station, said Healy, the Green Party councillor. 

“It’s not a framework plan. It’s a very clear, discrete public realm improvement project,” he said.

Fine Gael Councillor Aoibhinn Tormey asked if there was an active attempt to address the issues around the forecourt, or had it been parked until the Howth framework plan was being prepared?

That framework plan isn’t happening any time soon, she said. “When we were agreeing the frameworks and we did have Howth down, it wasn’t to specifically address this one issue. It was Howth as a whole.”

They have been working through the question of land ownership, Cadogan said. “The framework would offer the opportunity of bringing all the stakeholders together.”

But Healy said he doesn’t understand why councillors were being told a framework plan “had any logical connection” to this small-scale plan. “It’s clear to me, this is a project that belongs as a standalone project in the Capital Programme.”

Councillors on the committee agreed Healy’s motion that the redesign be included in the Capital Programme.