Challenge to go-ahead for dock project

Eight appeals have been lodged with An Bord Pleanala against Dublin Corporation's decision to grant permission for the proposed national conference centre and 4.1 million square feet of ancillary development at Spencer Dock.

The appellants include Mr Dermot Desmond, the financier, as well as An Taisce, the Irish Georgian Society, the East Wall Residents' Association, Dock lands Communities Against High-Rise and two city councillors, Mr Ciaran Cuffe (Greens) and Mr Gerard Breen (FG).

The Spencer Dock Development Company, a consortium consisting of Treasury Holdings, Mr Harry Crosbie, the docklands entrepreneur, and CIE, which owns the 51-acre site, has also appealed against the conditions laid down by the corporation's planners.

Their decision, made on August 6th, was to grant full permission for the conference centre and one adjoining office block and outline permission to redevelop the rest of the site, subject to the architects, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, submitting new plans.

The developers have consistently argued that ancillary office blocks, apartment buildings, hotels and retail facilities, amounting to a total of 5.5 million square feet, are required to subsidise the construction and operation over time of the £100 million conference centre.

Through their planning consultants, Frank L. Benson and Partners, they will be seeking to persuade An Bord Pleanala to grant full planning permission for the entire scheme as proposed, in order to ensure adequate funding for the loss-making conference centre.

But the third-party appellants are concerned about the height, bulk and scale of the development, which is the largest urban scheme to be proposed in the history of the State, and they are arguing that its effects on Dublin's skyline and the local communities would be damaging.

The submission made on behalf of Mr Desmond, who is credited with originating the International Financial Services Centre, even suggests that the conference centre itself should be scaled down to reduce its "unacceptable scale" in the context of the riverside setting.

"We see no valid argument to justify the need to build in excess of twice the height of Dublin's accepted norms," says the submission on Mr Desmond's behalf by Paul Keogh architects, which also criticises the architecture of the scheme as "extremely repetitive and banal".

It says that to accept this style of architecture on such colossal scale would be "a major travesty" in terms of its visual impact on the city and the precedent it would create.

Cllr Cuffe, who was the first to lodge an appeal against the corporation's decision, said his primary concern related to the poor urban design quality of the scheme and its unprecedented height and bulk which would have a hugely damaging effect on the city.

Several of the third-party appellants have requested an oral hearing. So far, An Bord Pleanala has not decided whether to accede to these requests, but given the scale of the proposed development and the number of appeals against it, an oral hearing seems more than likely.