So long Kimmage, Windy Arbour: Dublin’s disappearing districts

Gerrymandering by estate agents creates endangered list

If you’re currently looking to buy, you don’t need to be a geography boffin to have noticed a bit of artistic licence creeping into Dublin postcodes on estate agent listings. Certainly there seems to be some discrepancy if you’re buying a house or sending a letter in the same area.

Parts of Walkinstown and Kimmage, for example, are now listed as Terenure, Dublin 12. One four-bed bungalow for sale on Whitehall Road has the catch-all address of Dublin 12, Terenure, Dublin 6. Whitehall is off Kimmage Road West – firmly in Dublin 12 – with the property appearing to be located closer to Perrystown than Terenure on the Eircode finder, where the area is listed as Kimmage.

Two Kimmage properties in the adjacent estates of Brookfield and Brookfield Green are listed by different estate agents with different postcodes; one is Kimmage Road West, Dublin 12, the other Kimmage Road West, Dublin 6W, yet both properties are on the same side of the road, just down from the KCR, where Kimmage Road West meets Kimmage Road Lower.

Spare a thought for Windy Arbour, an area that has all but disappeared from estate agent mapping. The Eircode finder shows it to be on both sides of Dundrum Road, spreading west to Farranboley and Columbus, where the green line Luas Windy Arbour stop is located, and east to take in Mulvey Park, Olivemount and Beechmount Drive. To further confuse matters, Dundrum Business Park is slap bang in the middle of all this. If you Google “properties for sale in Windy Arbour” the portal Daft.ie delivers 16 different residences, but on closer inspection all 16 have Dundrum addresses. Not one has a Windy Arbour address. A similar search on MyHome.ie delivered no properties for sale in the area.

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The geographical shapeshifting goes on. Parts of Ballinteer have lost ground to Dundrum while the hinterland of Irishtown is at risk of being subsumed by Sandymount. Booterstown should be put on an endangered list. Broadstone too – despite having its own spanking new Luas stop in Dublin 7, its location is frequently listed as Phibsborough.

Ossory Road in Dublin 3 is another confusing one. Parts of it are listed as in North Strand while anything east of the railway tracks is considered East Wall. At Crosbie’s Yard, an apartment block built by Scott Tallon Walker, a two-bed apartment has a North Wall address while a three-bed unit in the same complex, mentions neither North Wall nor North Strand preferring to go simply with Dublin 3.