Councillors want housing on CIÉ-owned land at Connolly Station, since plan for offices has stalled

Ballymore doesn’t have the finance to build out the planned Dublin Arch development, on CIÉ-owned land beside Connolly Station, the company’s development director told Dublin city councillors at a recent meeting.

So, they say, the developer wants the state to provide a public-sector anchor tenant for the shiny tall offices, to help it get funding for them. 

Councillors, though, say they have another idea. 

They would rather the developer go back to the drawing board and build more homes on the big site, which covers about 111,000 sqm in the heart of the city.

A spokesperson for Ballymore declined to comment on questions about its plans for Dublin Arch, including whether it would consider changing back to a design that – as in the past – was weighted towards homes. 

Ballymore has a partner on the project, Singapore-based Oxley Holdings Ltd, which says it has a 90 percent stake in the development. 

In search of an anchor tenant

On 16 September, David Killion, the development director of Ballymore, met with councillors on the members of the Docklands Oversight and Consultative Forum.

He asked them to push the central government to find a public-sector tenant for the offices in Dublin Arch. 

Ballymore’s current plans for Dublin Arch include six office blocks, alongside 187 homes, shops and a hotel. 

Ballymore previously had planning permission for around 750 homes, alongside some offices and a hotel, in a development on the site – which it was then calling Connolly Quarter. 

But planning permission for that project was quashed in November 2020 at judicial review. And Ballymore came back and got the new planning permission for the more office-focused version, which it is calling Dublin Arch.

Sinn Féin Councillor Kourtney Kenny, who was at the meeting, said she was surprised that Killion seemed to assume that councillors would back Ballymore’s plans to build mostly offices on the site. 

Her main concern is delivering social and affordable housing, she says. 

“Obviously, I couldn’t push for something that has more office than residential in the current climate,” says Kenny, who represents the Docklands community on the southside. 

How many social homes would have been built under the old plans, even, is unclear – as planning documents suggested that the social homes in the development would likely be leased for 15 years, rather than permanent and council-owned.

Said Green Party Councillor Janet Horner, who was also at the meeting: “The state’s need is for housing and there is no need for offices as far as I can see.”

More offices?

If Ballymore won’t build more homes on the site, can CIÉ take the land back? asks Kenny, the Sinn Féin councillor. 

As the plans currently stand, only 19 of 187 homes in Dublin Arch would be social or affordable, she says. 

She asked in the meeting if Ballymore would consider redesigning the plans to include more homes. The response to that felt negative, she says. 

Kenny said she also wonders whether there is any time limit in the licence agreement between CIÉ and Ballymore. 

In May 2018, Singapore-based Oxley Holdings put out a press statement to say that it had been chosen as the development partner on the scheme.

At the time, it said that the agreement was subject to an annual licence fee of €2 million, followed by the higher of a premium rent of €3.5 million or 10 percent of the annual rental income from the development. 

The statement didn’t mention any timelines. Neither did a corporate update from Oxley Holdings earlier this year, which mentioned that the company had a 90 percent stake in the project. 

A spokesperson for CIÉ and Irish Rail didn’t answer a question about timelines.

“The site is owned by CIÉ, and is subject to a development agreement with Ballymore/Oxley,” says the spokesperson. 

“Any queries on progress with the development should be addressed to the developer directly,” they said.

New specs

Horner says that Dublin City Council needs to carry out an audit of office buildings in the city to understand the true level of vacancy and whether there are vacant blocks that could be converted to housing. 

John McCartney, a lecturer in property economics and real estate at TU Dublin, says that in Dublin, as in other cities, the office market is cyclical. 

“This means that, at some point, there will be a recovery,” he says. 

“However, given existing vacancy levels and the slow pace of absorption due to remote work and reduced tech leasing, a meaningful increase in rents is probably at least three years away,” he said.

Developers will find tenants for new build offices eventually, he says, but many “are taking quite a while to let-up and they may be disappointed with the rents they end up achieving”.

Councillors say that Killion, the development director for Ballymore, was pushing the idea in the meeting that there will be demand for new offices in 2030 because existing ones will not meet the new emissions standards for public buildings. 

The government has a target for all public buildings to achieve a minimum BER rating of B by 2030. 

That could potentially mean public sector organisations looking to move into new offices with BER’s of B or above.

But Horner says that the state should retrofit existing buildings, where possible, rather than moving. 

And new EU rules, under the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, call for the consideration of embodied carbon. 

It's not clear yet exactly how that will play out – but it could mean that public bodies opt to retrofit and renovate existing offices rather than move into shiny new buildings.

Marion Jammet, director of policy and advocacy with the Irish Green Building Council, says that the directive is set to be transposed into Irish law next year.

That directive says that all new public buildings should be zero emissions from 2028, and all new buildings to be zero emissions starting from 2030, she said.

“It would need to be implemented at the national level, so we don’t yet know exactly how it will be transposed here,” says Jammet. 

Article 7.2 requires member states to examine the entire life cycle of buildings, including the construction process and the use of materials in construction, says Jammet, commenting in general and not in relation to any proposed development.

“There are requirements for improving operational carbon emissions,” she says. “But there are also requirements for the embodied carbon emissions.”

The directive only talks about new buildings, she says, but “considering embodied carbon will over time lead to more re-use of existing buildings", she says.