Planning applications begin to file in for homes on industrial estate in Finglas

On McKee Avenue in Finglas, next-door neighbours Ciaran Healy and Gerard Blaney stand chatting over the wall of their front gardens.

The odd bus stops just outside their ox-bow shaped estate of semi-detached homes. People pass, carrying stuffed Lidl and Aldi bags.

Behind the bus stop is a chain link fence. 

And beyond it, the western edge of the Jamestown Business Park, which councillors rezoned in June 2021 – and where planning applications have started to go in for homes and amenities. 

The two recent applications – for more than 900 homes between them, on opposite sides of the industrial lands – offer some insights into how closely landowners may hew to the masterplan already agreed by councillors. 

Birth of the masterplan

In June 2021, Dublin city councillors voted to rezone the Jamestown Business Park in Finglas – which spreads over a 43-hectare triangle from McKee Avenue in the west to Jamestown Road in the east.

That followed a slew of votes a year earlier to rezone industrial lands, with the aim of opening up more big and underused brownfield sites for homes within the city. 

At the time of the Finglas vote, some councillors and local residents said they were concerned as to whether or not a promised masterplan would ever materialise or if development would end up haphazard. 

The council did finalise a masterplan, laying out what should be built where.

The Jamestown Masterplan was incorporated into the Dublin City Development Plan 2022–2028 in February 2024, said a spokesperson. 

The lands should, once developed, hold a mix of uses – with 65 percent homes and 25 percent employment or commercial, and then on top of those, community, education and ancillary uses.

They’re expected to fit between 3,500 and 3,800 homes, it says. Up to 2,600 of those are expected in the first phase, it says. 

Some provisions in the masterplan are fixed, others are considered flexible, and others are marked as indicative. 

The layout of the streets and blocks is considered fixed, with only minor changes allowed, the masterplan says.

The public open space is fixed too, it says, because it’s been designed to take into account flood risk and surface-water management.

It sets out heights for blocks that mostly run up to six storeys, but with some variation allowed and caveats. Applications will be assessed based on national standards and development plan standards, it says.

A few blocks are marked up to seven and eight storeys where appropriate, it says. That’s to make use of opportunities for “amplified height at prominent corners” to enhance the urban structure and add variety. 

Heights should generally drop on the south of urban blocks to allow for adequate light in blocks and courts, it says. 

And, “lower building heights are required along Jamestown Road, McKee Avenue and St Margaret’s Court, to respect existing residential properties and to provide adequate transition, gradually increasing towards the centre and north west of the lands,” it says.

The masterplan foresees two hubs on the land: a sustainable mobility hub in the north-west, near a proposed Luas station; and a community hub towards the middle of the site, near a school and public open space. 

What’s gone in?

In recent months, two big planning applications have gone in for parts of the masterplan lands.

On 30 April, Megrick Limited applied for permission to build 607 homes in five blocks, and 2,500sqm of other – retail, cafe or other use, and community and creche –  spaces, on a site of 3.7 hectares on the west of the masterplan lands.

It goes higher than the masterplan lays out. From 2 to 10 storeys, rather than from 1 to 8 storeys, plans show.

Megrick Limited’s  application says they assessed the impact and looked at the masterplan, and it is all sound. The application respects the principle of lower buildings along the edge, and higher in the middle of the site, it says, and uses taller buildings for architectural emphasis.

Keith Connolly, a local Fianna Fáil councillor, said he has lodged an observation on the proposal with the council about that.

“Obviously, it’s very hard to be opposed to housing, given the current crisis, but some elements of that completely look to disregard the masterplan,” he says. 

The height of some buildings on the peripheries were above what was agreed, he says.

“We put in the plan that some builds would be two or three storeys, because the houses across the road are two-storeys. In fairness, people in two storeys don't want a 10-storey beside them,” he says. 

“Lo and behold,” Connolly says, “the application was for much higher builds”.

Conor Reddy, the People Before Profit councillor, put out a statement at the end of last month saying, among other things, that he was worried about the lack of community infrastructure in the planning applications.

“Marked floorspace is no guarantee of delivery,” he said.

In Megrick Limited’s application, a planning report drawn up for them by BMA Planning says that there is space for community and cultural uses in two blocks – blocks A and B – of the scheme. 

But, “as the community that these will serve does not yet exist, it is not possible to accurately predict the precise end user of these units until the community is more established and demand can be determined based on actual needs at the time”, it says.

Block A would be age-friendly housing, and so the space in that would be operated for those residents by a private operator, it says. The space in block B is still to be determined, it says.

On the other side

Meanwhile, on the northeast of the industrial estate, Jamestown Village Limited has applied for permission to build five blocks with 298 apartments.

Along with 1,400sqm of community space, 740sqm of commercial space, and a 300sqm creche space, shows the application filed on 21 May.

It does have a higher ratio of residential to community and commercial spaces than laid out in the masterplan. But the masterplan is flexible on that, the application says. 

In earlier meetings, city planners had asked for more engagement with groups that might use the community spaces in future, the documents show. 

The landowner’s team had talked to the Finglas Youth Resource Centre, and to the arts groups MART and “Post Post Artist Group” about their needs and interests, the documents say.

The Jamestown Village Limited is on a plot that the masterplan envisions rising to no more than six storeys. It nudges that up a little, rising to seven storeys, but it sticks with three storeys along its eastern edge, near the existing lower homes.

“People need homes”

Mary Callaghan, a Social Democrats councillor, says that while she doesn’t think that the applications are ideal, neither she nor her party will oppose them.

“It's just our policy at the moment that unless it's a really, really bad development, that we're not inclined to object right now,” she says. “People need homes, desperately.” 

Both she and Rory Hearne TD, the Social Democrats housing spokesperson, feel the benefit of the housing outweighs any difficulty that they would have at the moment, she says.

Her focus is on pressing for important transport links, facilities within the community and the various different services like schools and doctors, she says.

“But at this point, this particular development, these two particular applications, we're not going to be objecting to,” Callaghan says.

In front of his home on McKee Avenue on Thursday, Blaney, the local resident, said he was worried there were lots of apartments but not enough parking planned.

“They might say the Luas is coming, but that’s years and years away. What do we do in the meantime?” he says.

Said Healy, his neighbour: “You’d want to see how busy this place is with traffic in the morning and evening. You can’t get out of here.” 

“Now, how are we going to manage with thousands of people wedged into apartments?” he says. 

Healy said he would prefer houses with gardens, which he sees as places for families to live and build a community. 

He is concerned that one- or two-bed apartments will just become stop-gaps for people before they move on somewhere else.

And “where are kids going to go to school? Where are the facilities?” Healy asks. “And forget about getting a doctor”, he says, “I have to go to Clonee to see a GP as is”.

The masterplan does foresee a new school on lands in the industrial estate in the future.

What about the affordable housing? 

Reddy, the People Before Profit councillor, said that when he looked through the two applications, he was struck by the estimated costs of delivery.

For the Megrick Limited scheme, the all-in costs cited for the Part V homes – the slice of homes to be bought by the council for social tenants – were €470,000 for the cheapest one-bed, and €636,000 for a three-bed.

Those costs aren’t set in stone. 

But Reddy says he has wondered what that means for affordability of the other homes that are to come.

How to build on the city’s brownfield lands in a compact way and enable affordability is a point of discussion.

When councillors rezoned the masterplan lands in June 2021, some discussion turned on what mix of tenure would be built – so, how many private, how many public or not-for-profit, and how many for renters and how many for homeowners. 

But that couldn’t be set out in the masterplan. 

At the time, though, a coalition of landowners controlling 8.4 hectares called the Finglas Employers Group said they were committed to a chunk of affordable housing on their lands.

Andrew Griffith, project manager with the Finglas Employers Group, said the homes that they all built would be mixed tenure. 

The group was working with Clúid, an approved housing body, to develop social and affordable homes, he said in June 2021. “A large element of that will be affordable housing.”

Its submission to the planned rezoning said the same. The group had “formally engaged” with Clúid to guide the delivery of development on the lands once they are rezoned, it said. 

The group was “committed to deliver a high-quality, mixed-use, multi-tenured development here that would cater to the needs of housing the elderly and vulnerable as well as affordable independent accommodation for students, starter families etc”, they said.

Whether that is still the plan is under wraps. 

A spokesperson for Clúid said they wouldn’t comment. “As a matter of course, we do not confirm or deny Clúid’s involvement in any project until all negotiations and legal matters have been concluded.”

Peter Crowley, a director at the investment firm FL Partners, which also has a stake in the project, said he couldn’t talk about details of anything as it is all commercially sensitive. 

The Finglas Employers Group may have spoken about the relationship with Clúid before, he said, but the situation is different now. “It’s different when the rubber hits the road.”

Megrick Limited, which put in the planning application for its site in April, was part of the Finglas Employers Group. Brian Hogan, a director of Megrick Limited didn’t respond to an email with queries about its plans. 

Its planning application does say that, in line with legislation, 20 percent of the homes will be Part V units. Those, the documents suggest, would be the age-friendly apartments – which are all one-beds – in Block A, and some of the homes in Block B. 

Indeed, planners asked also about plans for tenure, documents show. 

“There is a proposal that Block B will be operated by an Approved Housing Body,” said the response. Block B would hold 134 apartments. 

Elsewhere on the wider site, the masterplan notes the possibility that the Land Development Agency may develop some social and affordable homes on lands owned by the ESB in the north-west. 

A spokesperson for Dublin City Council said that issues such as compliance with the masterplan and national guidelines, and issues such as tenure mix and costings, are dealt with as the applications are assessed through the development management process.

The council does not comment on live planning applications subject to this development management process, said the spokesperson.