There’s an interesting thing about this massive development: it doesn’t exist. It is an outline drawing of a possible notion
Things in Ireland that merit the adjective “breath-taking”. The Cliffs of Moher on a wild Atlantic day. The light radiating from a snow-covered Mount Errigal. Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ in the National Gallery. Newgrange at the winter solstice. And the gall of some developers.
The hearing concerned the proposed metro stop at a place called Northwood. If you’ve ever been to Ikea, it’s the area across the main road, just north of Ballymun and south of the M50, with a large shopping mall and a load of apartments.
The towers that make the current metro design allegedly unviable are castles in the air. Lidl hasn’t even applied for planning permission and indeed there is no indication that it intends to do so any time soonof such a mass of buildings on top of it. Lidl’s representative therefore issued a demand: the tunnels and the Northwood station must be redesigned “to take full account of the future development of the Lidl site and not restrict it in any way”.
Indeed, TII had understood that Lidl was intending to develop a different part of the site and had made its plans accordingly. But Lidl’s lawyer nonetheless insisted that the fact the proposed developed was revealed for the first time at the hearing was “of absolutely no relevance”. TII would still have to change its plans to accommodate the airy vagary.
The revealing thing about all of this is the sense of entitlement. Lidl didn’t send in an architectural firm, a firm of planning consultants and a senior counsel just for the fun of it. It actually expects that a crucial piece of public infrastructure should be reverse-engineered from a notional drawing of a possible high-rise complex it might or might not build at some unspecified time in the future.
This is the essence of developer-led planning. Ireland’s political, social, environmental and economic future depends on our ability to plan for public need rather than for private greed. Perhaps Lidl have done us a favour by reminding us how deep the opposite assumptions go.
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