Axing of St Michael’s Inchicore regeneration design contract will cause lengthy delays, councillors say

A decision to terminate the contract of the lead architects behind the regeneration of St Michael’s Estate in Inchicore will result in “inevitable lengthy delays” to the project, Dublin city councillors have said.

The council management has ended its contract with Bucholz McEvoy Architects, designers of the council’s flagship cost-rental regeneration project at St Michael’s Estate and has advertised for new tenders for the development.

An application for the 578 cost rental and social homes has already been submitted to An Bord Pleanála for approval. A spokesman for the council said it does “not comment on live procurement or contractual matters”. Bucholz McEvoy Architects said it was not in a position to comment on the matter.

Local councillors on Wednesday unanimously supported a motion from Sinn Féin councillor Máire Devine calling for the council management’s decision to be reversed. Councillors were “confounded by the unilateral decision to terminate the integrated design team that have been working on the Emmet Road Development for some years now,” Ms Devine said.

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“In the interests of continued productive community relations and continuity of the development, we request that this decision be reversed. This is vital so as to avoid numerous inevitable lengthy delays that retendering poses,” she said.

Labour councillor Darragh Moriarty said the decision was “baffling” and the new tenders, which required the architects to have a higher company turnover, seemed a “petty and spiteful” way to exclude the original architects.

Independent councillor Vincent Jackson said, “Seldom have I seen a decision go down so badly”, adding that the amount of correspondence he had received objecting to the council’s decision had “gone off the Richter scale”.

The Green Party’s Michael Pidgeon said councillors and the local community had been “blindsided” by the decision. “It undermined a lot of trust.”

Inchicore Regeneration Consultative Forum (IRCF), a stakeholders oversight group established by the council, has written to the body stating it is “extremely concerned” by the move, which was made without consultation.

[ Concerns over St Michael’s Estate regeneration in Inchicore ]

“The IRCF are at a loss as to how this decision was made and unless an understanding of the reason for the decision is known, the IRCF are paralysed as to how this project can proceed successfully,” independent forum chairman, Eamon Devoy, wrote.

The forum was “extremely concerned that the change in the design team will mean that the considerable voluntary investment and enthusiasm for the proposed Emmet Road development by members of the IRCF and wider community will be lost and that there will be no ongoing co-design and community participation in the detailed design process,” Mr Devoy wrote.

The cost-rental plans for St Michael’s were announced in July 2018 by then minister for housing Eoghan Murphy. In December 2020, the council said plans would be lodged with An Bord Pleanála in April 2021 but the project stalled during the pandemic.

Cost rental apartments for low and middle-income workers, where the rents are based on the cost of building and managing the homes and not market rates, will account for 70 per cent of the 578 homes, with the remaining 30 per cent to be used for social housing.

St Michael’s Estate has been earmarked for regeneration since the late 1990s. It was one of five sites, including O’Devaney Gardens, to be redeveloped with social and private housing under a public-private partnership deal between the council and developer Bernard McNamara, which collapsed in 2008. In 2014, the council completed Thornton Heights on part of the site, a social housing complex of 75 homes.