Residents leave council “consultation” on fire-damaged community centre wondering what just happened

In June 2021, a fire broke out on the roof of the community centre on Donore Avenue, in Dublin 8. 

At the time, Fearghal Connolly, manager of the Donore Community Drug and Alcohol Team – which had run the Targeted Responses with Youth (TRY) project out of the building – said they hoped to be back in and back to work there in six months.  

His was one of the many groups and services that operated out of the centre. For example, St Catherine’s National School used to use the hall for its end-of-year concert, said Karen Jordan, the principal. 

A year after the fire, the centre was still closed, and residents protested outside it. Afterwards, Jen Cummins and Monica Grogan talked about how their sons were going to be missing out on the centre’s summer project that year.

Nearly four more years later, the centre is still not back open – although it is finally under construction, surrounded by scaffolding and blue netting. There’s about €11.6 million in the council’s budget for the works.

Stuck on the building are little flyers announcing a “public consultation” at Scoil Treasa Naofa.

“This is an opportunity for local residents, community groups and centre users to hear about the plans and share their views on how the space can best serve the community into the future,” the flyer said.

That meeting, led by Dublin City Council staff members, was last Thursday evening. Gerry Dempsey, a local resident, attended it, he said by phone on Tuesday. 

“I’m 69. I’ve been to more meetings than you’ve had dinners, so I know how they’re supposed to go,” he said. “I have never been at such a disaster.”

The event was not well advertised to residents of the area, it seemed the council already had a plan they did not intend to vary and didn’t really want ideas from residents, and the presenter did not seem well prepared, Dempsey said.

Usually at these events, the plans for the thing that’s being built will be put up on the walls of the hall where the meeting is, so people can examine them, said Catherine McSweeney, another local resident who was there Thursday evening. 

And then the architects who came up with the plans, and are well familiar with them, will be available to explain them, McSweeney said. 

But this event wasn’t like that, she said. 

The main speaker from the council seemed unprepared, there were no mics so everything was hard to hear, and the plans shown during the presentation were hard to decipher, she said. “Usually they do them much better.”

Cummins, who back in 2022 was at the protest, lamenting the continued closure of the centre, has since been elected a local councillor and then a TD. She too was at the meeting last Thursday 

“People were really really unhappy,” Cummins said Tuesday. “I mean really unhappy.” 

She said she’d written to the council’s chief executive, Richard Shakespeare, and area manager Bevin Herbert, “to say that a community consultation has to take place which actually consults people”. 

The council has not responded to a query sent Tuesday morning asking if they were aware that some residents were unhappy with the event last week, and whether there are plans to try again.

Zooming out

The fire at the community centre appears to have been caused by accident, said Stephen Rourke, chair of the Donore Project Consultative Forum, back in 2023. 

“There was a police inquiry and the police inquiry found that there wasn’t malicious intent,” he said. “It was an accident. I think it happened in the roof garden area.” 

Rourke says the police inquiry and the insurance issues “were probably sorted out towards the tail end of that year”. 

As the years have passed, and the rebuilding project was delayed again and again, Rourke has pushed for information on the causes of the delays – and for action to get the centre rebuilt and back to serving its community. 

“Some people in the community have been saying this wouldn’t all have taken as long in a more middle-class, salubrious part of Dublin,” Rourke said.

Meanwhile, the area has been changing. 

The Land Development Agency (LDA) is now in the midst of building its Donore Project. On the site, adjacent to the community centre, the cranes are high and the apartment buildings are rising.  

Phase 1 of the project, the bit now under construction, is 542 new cost-rental and social homes, as well as “a new creche, community spaces, a café/retail unit” and “the new home for the Donore Boxing Club”, according to the LDA. 

The first homes are due to be completed in November, it says.

These community spaces will be “Flexible spaces designed to support a range of community uses and activities”, according to an April 2026 LDA document. 

Phase 2, for which the council on 1 May launched a public consultation, is to include about 124 “affordable and Social homes” – some in a “15/16-storey over basement apartment block” – as well as “a full-sized GAA championship-sized pitch”, and a new public park with areas for children and teenagers. 

There’s an informational event about that planned for Thursday 7 May from 5pm to 8pm at the Wisdom Centre, Sophia Housing, 25 Cork Street. 

Next to the community centre and the Donore Project, there are also the privately owned Player Wills and Bailey Gibson sites, where developer Hines got planning permission to build hundreds more homes.  

The plans for the Bailey Gibson site include 416 build-to-rent homes, and the plans for the Player Wills site include 492 apartments, according to the April LDA document. 

“The plans for development will keep and modify the existing Player Wills Factory and provide space for community, arts and cultural exhibition space, retail, café/bar/restaurant, co-working office space”, it says.

Although the LDA document says the sites are “now being developed by Kennedy Wilson”, a spokesperson for Kennedy Wilson said on Tuesday that this is incorrect. “Kennedy Wilson has not taken control of the sites in question,” he said. 

What are Kennedy Wilson's plans for the two sites? Does it plan to proceed with the existing planning permissions, or go back to the drawing board? 

“Kennedy Wilson are still awaiting CCPC [Competition and Consumer Protection Commission] approval to take control of the fund that owns the development sites,” he said. “Therefore, Kennedy Wilson is not in a position to comment in relation to the direction of these developments.” 

In addition to the privately owned developments on the Player Wills and Bailey Gibson sites, the community centre, and the Donore Project, there’s another piece to the puzzle, said McSweeney, who is a member of the Donore Project Consultative Forum.

“There's a remaining planning permission to go in, and it's for the last bit of the Player site and also the church lands that were sold to them [Hines],” McSweeney said. 

This is a small bit of land between St Catherine’s Church and the community centre, where there’s a plan to build a “six-room, two-storey” building housing changing rooms for players at the big new pitch to use, she said. 

“So we hope it's that, but, you know, but that's not guaranteed until it's actually on the actual plans,” she said.

Concerns

All this development on the sites is set to bring thousands more residents to the area, McSweeney said.

However, there are no plans for new community centres in the Donore Project or at the Player Wills or Bailey Gibson sites, she said. 

Still, the community centre is being built back the same size as it was before any of this happened, not bigger, McSweeney said.

At the meeting, residents tried to suggest to the council staffers how to maybe tweak the re-built community centre so it’ll work as well as possible.

“I worked in the community center as a volunteer, doing summer camps, drama groups and stuff like that,” McSweeney said. “So we've known the workings of it and the way it's run first-hand, like, over many years.”

Also, they wanted to make sure that in the gap in time between when the community centre is reopened, and the new changing rooms are built on the church lands, the community centre isn’t used for changing rooms. 

“There is two changing rooms in it already, and what we want is that, basically they're not going to be the changing rooms for the pitch, because it's such a small community center, and if they start being used at the changing rooms for the pitch, there'll be that forever,” she said.

But, said Dempsey, the local resident, people who attended the meeting and tried to make suggestions did not feel heard or understood.

So what’s needed is to try again, said Cummins, the Social Democrats TD. The community hasn’t had a community centre for years now, she said. 

“And we haven’t all been together to discuss it, and really, there needed to be a what happened, how it happened and then, you know, where we are now, and what we want in the future type approach to that and it didn’t happen that way,” she said.

So she’s going to be pushing “a proper consultation for the community on that. That may not just be one session, that may be a couple of sessions,” she said.