Developers rail against metro path

LIAM CARROLL’S boom time lieutenants David Torpey and John Pope have largely stayed out of the headlines since the collapse of Carroll’s Zoe Group empire but Torpey’s name crops up on the list of people who made submissions to Fingal County Council on its new development plan.

Carroll’s Dunloe Ewart group is still operating away and Torpey wrote to the council to say Dunloe acts for Turckton, which objects to the proposed alignment of Metro West because it “is not acceptable to us”. Torpey said the proposal “decimates our land holding in terms of our ability to develop the balance of our land in a coherent fashion”.

Torpey said they would prefer if the proposed levy scheme for the metro would not be applied “until such time as the funding for the construction of Metro West had been confirmed by the Government”.

Turckton owns 100 acres of undeveloped land at Horizon Logistics Park near Dublin Airport, which is zoned for warehousing and distribution uses. Metro West – an orbital route from Tallaght to the airport – was one of those proposals by the last government that made little sense during the boom and makes even less sense now.

It was designed to open up land for development, even though there were many areas within the M50 that were seeing population declines at the time. Economist Jerome Casey made a strong case for rejuvenating areas within the M50, instead of developing greenfield space, because schools and other infrastructure was already in place.

Meanwhile Joe O’Reilly’s Castlethorn has also been keeping a relatively low profile of late but it too made a submission to Fingal County Council earlier this year about land it owns on the Diswellstown Road in Porterstown, near Blanchardstown. It told the council that it plans to develop a mixed-use scheme comprising a discount foodstore, residential development and a couple of shops on its site which is next to the land earmarked for a rail interchange between Metro West and the mainline Maynooth rail land, if Metro West ever goes ahead that is. O’Reilly’s team believes that an exclusively residential development on the site would be “inefficient”.