Glasnevin industrial site offers potential for thousands of homes

The council is developing plans to govern future construction on 75 hectares of land encompassing the Dublin Industrial Estate, opposite Glasnevin Cemetery, and plots to its west close to Broombridge station in Cabra.

The council five years ago began a review of 82 industrial zoned sites across the city to determine their suitability for housing use. Many of the smaller plots of land, particularly those in established residential areas, have since been rezoned for housing.

Larger sites, particularly tracts of industrial land close to the city, some of which were substantially vacant or underutilised, required framework plans to govern their development in a coherent manner, the council said, to enable their development over time into new suburbs or even urban towns.

The largest of these sites has become part of the City Edge project, which envisages the transformation of 700 hectares of industrial land along the Naas Road with 40,000 new homes. These lands, which fall into both the city council and South Dublin County Council jurisdiction, are expected to be completed over many decades with homes due to be completed between 2030 and 2070.

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However, perhaps the most strategically important land for the city council, and arguably the best located, is the Dublin Industrial Estate. The council is developing a local area plan (LAP) for the lands which are bordered to the east by the Finglas Road opposite Glasnevin Cemetery, Ratoath Road at Ashtown to the west, Cabra to the south, and Tolka Valley Park, which separates Cabra and Finglas, to the north.

The Ballyboggan LAP, named for the road which runs along the Tolka River park, would “enable the compact and sustainable mixed-use regeneration and redevelopment of the area”, the council said, and identify the “types of development that will be encouraged, and where this development should be located”.

The land is extremely well positioned for residential development, with transport links including the Luas green line and the Maynooth rail line at Broombridge, while at its eastern edge it is less than 15 minutes’ walk to Phibsborough. The Royal Canal runs through the site and the Tolka River is immediately to the north. The area to the south is dominated by the largely two-storey housing developments of Cabra, but to the west, substantial high-density apartment development is already under way next to the Ratoath Road and heading into Pelletsown.

While the focus will be on the residential potential of the lands, the council said it had yet to be determined how much of the site would remain in commercial or industrial and employment uses. The land would remain zoned for industrial use until the LAP had been approved to avoid a situation where landowners were “running in front of the council’s plans”, city planner Deirdre Scully said.

“This is a tactical decision in many ways because what we didn’t want was a situation where individual land owners would seek planning permission if the land had already been zoned” for residential use. “This is a very large piece of land and not all of it is going to come forward at the same time and we also don’t want it to come forward in pieces all over the place. It is a question of looking strategically at how it will be delivered as the draft plan comes forward.”

An “issues paper” on the LAP will be available for submissions for four weeks. The council hopes to have the LAP completed by July of next year.