Council to lift `cap' on Quarryvale centre

The current "cap" on further expansion of Quarryvale, Dublin's most strategically located shopping centre scheme, will be lifted in a draft county development plan to be published today by South Dublin County Council. Hundreds of acres of agricultural land are also expected to be rezoned for industrial and residential development in the draft plan, which will also reaffirm the council's determination to proceed with a new outer ring road, west of the M50.

The Quarryvale shopping centre, which is now under construction on a 180-acre site at the junction of the M50 and the N4 Lucan-Galway road, is capped at 250,000 square feet in the current county plan, adopted by the former Dublin County Council in 1993.

This limit was imposed by councillors - and accepted at the time by O'Callaghan Properties, the Quarryvale developers - in order to ensure the scheme would not draw business away from shopping centres in Tallaght and Blanchardstown.

Last year, it was announced that the Duke of Westminster's Grosvenor Estates company has taken a 50 per cent stake in the development, largely because of the strategic location of the site and the higher purchasing power of Irish consumers. With anchor tenants such as Marks and Spencer demanding units of up to 70,000 square feet, the developers have been in discussion with South Dublin County Council in an effort to get the cap removed, so that it could grow in line with "market forces". Recently, the county council granted planning permission to the developers for a 300,000 sq ft "retail park" at Quarryvale, in addition to the previously-approved shopping centre, on a portion of the site earlier earmarked for an industrial estate.

The original scheme for Quarryvale, unveiled in 1989 by Mr Tom Gilmartin, a Sligo-born developer operating from England, envisaged that it would become Ireland's largest single shopping centre, with some two million square feet of retail space.

Though the Quarryvale scheme was sold to county councillors on the basis that it would provide much-needed shopping facilities for the depressed north Clondalkin area, it is really a motorway shopping centre aimed at a much wider - and richer - catchment area. The attraction of Quarryvale is its location at the fulcrum of the M50, directly west of the city centre, where it would be within the driving range of hundreds of thousands of shoppers when the next phase of the bypass - the Southern Cross Route - is completed.

Because it was denied direct access from the M50 due to fears that this would create major traffic congestion, a substantial sum of money has been invested on an underpass beneath the N4, west of the Palmerstown interchange, to cater for the shopping centre.