Majority of council moves to force Fingal to get on with moving Donabate library to Ballisk House

Fingal County Council has halted a survey to determine the future use of the former credit union building in Donabate.

Ballisk House, the vacant two-storey council-owned property on the outskirts of the seaside town, was slated to be redeveloped as a new library.

At the full council’s April meeting, Fingal’s chief executive, AnnMarie Farrelly, had said that a survey would shortly be run to see whether locals wanted that.

The result of that survey could potentially have opened up the option of putting something other than the library into Ballisk House.

But this plan to run the survey has now fallen apart. 

That’s because the objectivity of the poll was questioned locally, and local councillors issued an inaccurate statement to the public, said a council spokesperson on Tuesday.

The draft questions for the survey were shown to local councillors to ensure it was worded fairly, says Ann Hogan of local campaign group DP Crossroads, which has been pushing for a new more substantial community centre. “They were biased towards a library.”

The local councillors who issued the statement and viewed the survey did not comment when contacted for this story.

At a meeting of the council’s corporate policy group on 6 May, Farrelly said the poll is on hold, with no indication as to whether it will be started up again.

On  Tuesday evening, more than half of Fingal’s councillors had said they would trigger a rarely used provision to get the chief executive to just proceed immediately with Ballisk House’s redevelopment as a library.

Redeveloping the library

Fingal County Council bought Ballisk House in March 2022 after the Progressive Credit Union closed its Donabate branch.

The council’s capital programmes for 2024 to 2026, and for 2025 to 2027, both included a plan to redevelop the site as a library, a council spokesperson said on Tuesday.

Similarly, Fingal’s Library Development Plan 2024 to 2029, adopted by the council in January 2024, included an action to relocate Donabate’s library to the credit union.

And, in March 2024, councillors adopted the Donabate Framework Plan, which  again, listed this upgrade as one of its projects.

These extension works would make it a state-of-the-art facility, a council spokesperson on Tuesday.

Currently, the library is 300 metres down the road from Ballisk House in the Donabate-Portrane Community Centre, and “is at its limit in terms of space and service development”, they said.

But the move could free up 393 sqm of space in the community centre for community activities, they said.

Community facilities in the Donabate-Portrane area were deemed as insufficient by locals, according to the plan, with few available for teenagers, and many in need of an upgrade.

But, the framework plan also identified a large extension to the Donabate-Portrane community centre to cater for the needs of youth, arts, culture and heritage groups in the area, the spokesperson said.

The council has allocated €4 million to these refurbishment works, which would include two large multipurpose rooms, two meeting rooms and two storage rooms, the spokesperson said.

On 15 February, the council said that it had started the upgrades to Ballisk House. The library is expected to be open by the end of this year, says the council’s website.

Poll interrupted

While the redevelopment of the library would free up some space in the existing community centre, not everybody on the peninsula thought this could address the scarcity of facilities.

DP Crossroads, the local campaign group, had been asking for a youth and cultural facility to be developed by the council on the peninsula since November 2023, according to its website.

On 10 March, the group filed for a judicial review of planning permission granted for the second phase of a major housing development at Ballymastone.

A community facility should be provided in the development in accordance with the Donabate local area plan, the group argued.

But the judicial review angered some councillors, who said it would delay the delivery of hundreds of houses and a planned €10 million sports hub. The group withdrew it on 10 April.

Before they made that move, DP Crossroads met with Farrelly, the chief executive, in late March, said group chairperson Ann Hogan on Friday.

They discussed the possibility of using Ballisk House as a solution to the lack of youth and cultural facilities in Donabate and Portrane, Hogan said. “We were a bit surprised.”

According to the council’s spokesperson, meetings between Farrelly and DP Crossroads occurred between December 2024 and April 2025.

At them, she said any changes to the framework plan and capital programmes would need to be approved by the council, and that DP Crossroads’ “claims regarding community preferences” would be tested through a survey, the spokesperson said.

On 15 April, Farrelly said at the full council meeting that they had hired RedC to carry out a poll, asking residents if they actually wanted Ballisk House to be a library. 

“There’s an understanding locally that that’s not the desired use of that building,” she said.

Hogan said their only proviso for the poll was that the three local councillors – Eoghan Dockrell of Fine Gael, Corina Johnston of Labour and Paul Mulville of the Social Democrats – would see the questions before they were sent to the public.

“Just to make sure the questions were impartial or fair,” she said.

The survey was derailed when the objectivity of the draft was questioned, said the council spokesperson on Tuesday.

On 28 April, councillors Johnston, Mulville and Dockrell put out a statement on Ballisk House, saying they welcomed a proposal from council management to provide a multi-functional youth and arts space in the old credit union.

The spokesperson for the council said that this statement was not correct. But they did not say why the statement was inaccurate.

This statement and the questioned objectivity led to widespread confusion within the community, the spokesperson said, “and has resulted in the Council concluding that the carrying out of a survey is not feasible at this time”.

By order of the chamber

Debate around the provision of a new community centre in the Donabate-Portrane area has led to flare-ups at council meetings since March.

Most recently, at the full council meeting on 11 May.

After the RedC poll was postponed, independent Councillor Jimmy Guerin attempted to table a motion about the library. 

The Mayor, Labour Councillor Brian McDonagh, who was chairing the meeting, ruled it out of order.

Guerin, speaking on Tuesday evening, said the motion had been to have this matter debated.

At the meeting, McDonagh had said that it wasn’t a substantial part of the chief executive’s monthly report, the agenda issue at hand at the time, so it couldn’t be raised. 

The lack of clarity as to why his motion wasn’t being allowed is an example of what has led to “the confusion in Donabate”, Guerin said. “This is such a failure of leadership.”

Guerin refused to accept that the motion was out of order. McDonagh asked him to withdraw from the meeting. He refused. 

On 19 May, Guerin sent the chief executive a notice “to proceed immediately” with Ballisk House’s redevelopment under Section 140 of the Local Government Act (2001 as amended).

Section 140 is a rarely-used legal instrument which allows councillors to order the council into doing something.

Written by Guerin and signed by 22 other councillors, the notice was circulated by Fingal’s Corporate Services to all 40 elected representatives on Tuesday. It said the councillors intended to propose this resolution at the full council meeting on 9 June.

Re-developing the library would carry into effect the council’s decisions, as they were approved in the Donabate Framework Plan, the Library Development Plan and the Fingal County Council Capital Programme, the proposal said.

The matter needs to be disposed of, said Guerin on Tuesday. “We went through a framework plan, a capital plan and the library’s plan. The councillors need to show leadership here.”