Developer argues for building five apartments on derelict Grotto House site in Inchicore, without planning permission

Later this month, An Coimisiún Pleanála is due to decide whether a developer can build five apartments on a long-term derelict site in Inchicore without planning permission. 

The boarded-up Grotto House building at 129 Tyrconnell Road was previously used for a youth club. 

In June 2023, Dublin City Council added it to its derelict sites register, and local resident Suzanne Corcoran said it had been sitting there rotting for nearly 20 years before that. 

Pathway Homes Ltd owns the site. Last year, it applied to Dublin City Council to ask if it could develop the existing buildings into four apartments, without seeking planning permission. 

Planning rules allow some vacant commercial premises to be turned into homes without planning permission. 

But in this case, the council planner said the proposed development was not exempt from planning because the previous use was community use (a youth club), not a commercial use. 

A few months later, Pathway applied again for a decision on whether it could build apartments on the site – this time five – without planning permission. Again, the council said no, and for the same reason.

This time, Pathway appealed that decision to An Coimisiún Pleanála, saying the last permitted use was a retail use – a shop selling religious items, in the 1960s. 

The building is long-term vacant, says the appeal. “The client has clear intentions to bring the building back into active use, and it will provide much needed, high-quality accommodation to the area.”

But even if the appeal is successful, the company has other, bigger problems. 

Cathal O’Connor, one of its owners and directors, has been sentenced to prison for two years, from 1 July. 

O’Connor received a five-year prison sentence last week, with three years suspended, for assaulting, threatening and falsely imprisoning two 13-year-old boys in March 2024.

According to RTÉ, the court heard that O’Connor choked a 13-year-old boy to the point that he passed out for about 10 seconds, punched him repeatedly and hit him in the face with a pole. 

O’Connor didn’t respond to queries sent on Tuesday and Thursday as to how this is likely to affect the development projects he’s been working on – whether there was someone else who could take over and continue to push the projects forward.

He’s owner and/or director of multiple companies, according to The Currency, and employs more than 100 people, according to RTÉ.

Pathway Homes Ltd has two other owners and directors, Mary O’Connor and Declan O’Connor, who each own around 40 percent each of the company, who may well push ahead with the project.  

Pathway Homes parent company Beldare has not yet replied to an email query sent Thursday. 

Grotto House

Fronting onto Tyrconnell Road, Grotto House was built in about 1930, according to a Dublin City Council planner’s report from 2010.

It’s one storey facing the road, and two storeys behind, as the ground slows down to the Camac River. Even further down the slope, connected by a stairwell, is a single-storey sports hall on the riverbank.

There was a time when the shop at 129 Tyrconnell Road sold rosaries, prayer beads, and rosettes for girls taking their first communion, said John McGrath in September 2023. “Like a gift shop for the church,” he said.

There was the youth club too, says McGrath, who grew up in the area. Well, first it was a boys’ club, but girls were allowed in from the 1980s, said Corcoran, who says she started going there when she was 16 or 17 years old.

When the owner, William Joseph Lacy, died in 1961, his will said Grotto House was to be held in trust for the use of “St Joseph’s Boys Club, attatched [sic] to the Conference of Mary Immaculate Inchicore, of the Society of St Vincent de Paul”, according to a copy of a solicitor’s letter from 1967 provided by Corcoran.

If the club ceased to exist, Lacy wanted the premises to be used for other youth work, or if that wasn’t possible, “as a Saint Vincent de Paul Social/Welfare Centre”, the letter says.

If that wasn’t possible, the property should be sold “and the procedes [sic] given to the Conference of Mary Immaculate, Inchicore of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul for the benefit of the poor of the district”, it says.

The club kept going in the centre for decades after Lacy’s death, until a fire inspector judged the centre unsafe in about 2005, Corcoran says.

McGrath said the building “was looked after, but it had its time”. Corcoran said it was in fine shape and doesn’t think it should have been closed. “I saw it with my own eyes. There was nothing wrong with it,” she said in 2023. 

Exempted development?

In its most recent application to the council, Pathway Homes Ltd proposed that it would retain the two existing buildings on the site and reconfigure them internally to deliver five new apartments. 

In December 2025, it asked Dublin City Council to assess whether it needed to apply for planning permission, because turning vacant commercial buildings into housing is sometimes exempt.

In January, the council said that the proposed development was not exempt and would need to go through the planning permission process. The planner’s report says that the building had previously been a community facility and not a commercial premises. 

The fact that one part of the building was once commercial was irrelevant, says the council planners' report. 

Since the plan is to develop the entire building, the whole building would need to have been in commercial use. “Partial or historic use of a minor portion does not satisfy this requirement,” it says.  

“While some retail use may have occurred on the site (as indicated by a previous application in 2010 and online historical records), no evidence has been submitted to confirm that retail/Class 1 was the sole use at one stage,” says the report.

But Pathway Homes appealed that decision to An Coimisiún Pleanála, through its agent Foundation Management Consultants, arguing that a change of use planning permission was never granted to convert the building from retail to community use. 

“The nature of the building having a limited planning history does not give rise to the assumption that the most recent use was indeed an approved or authorised one,” says the appeal. 

There was no planning permission application to change the building to a community use, says the appeal, so it argues that it was an unauthorised use.

The building was used as a shop before 1964, when modern planning permission requirements were introduced, so the consultants argue that the retail use is the only authorised use. 

“It would set a dangerous precedent if an unauthorised use were to establish a new baseline use,” it says.