Give us back our playing fields! ‘It’s absolutely mayhem here on Sunday mornings’
For generations of children, the pitches in St Anne’s Park have been a haven for sports and recreation, beloved by all. Now, though, the teams have nowhere to play: a developer has bought them up to build houses. The community, however, won’t give in with
PASSING through the main gates into St Anne’s Park, the noise of traffic along the frenetic Sybil Hill Avenue dissipates and visitors are enveloped in a chorus of birdsong. The grand avenue sweeps as far as the eye can see, framed with ancient, towering sycamore and oak trees, all precisely planted with matching species on either side.
It feels timeless here in this idyllic pocket of North Dublin. On a busy lunchtime, the busy city feels a million miles away. Mothers and fathers push babies in buggies, dog-walkers amble and chat, and joggers wearing headphones zig-zag between the avenue and the adjacent woodlands, dappled with early yellow daffodils and purple crocuses.
Upon entering the park, immediately to the left are six playing fields — a green 15-acre expanse that for many years was where countless thousands of children played, but in recent months has become a battleground.
Marlet — one of the biggest developers in the country, owned by Tom Crean — wants to build 104 houses and 432 apartments here but the community is hellbent on fighting tooth and nail to save their piece of paradise.
Marlet’s first application to develop the site in 2015 was declared invalid, as an incorrect company name had been used in the application. A second bid was withdrawn at the last hour but the latest application comes just as new legislation under the fasttrack Strategic Housing Development legislation beds in.
The battle for St Paul’s recently brought thousands of angry protesters here to St Anne’s Park. They are outraged at the scale of Marlet’s housing plan; its 2015 application was for 381 units but its latest proposal for the same site is for 536 units, up 43%.
For as long as locals can remember the six pitches next to St Paul’s College teemed with children of all ages playing GAA, soccer and rugby. But these hundreds of children have been locked out since January 1, when Marlet’s final development proposal was lodged with An Bord Pleanála.
Clontarf Football Club — which has 30 teams made up of 400 children between the ages of eight to 17 — is now homeless.
The eviction has left Clontarf GAA, with more than 1,900 members ‘desperately short of playing facilities’. Midweek, they are forced to do late-night sessions at Clontarf Rugby Club, once rugby training ends.
But, perhaps most heartbreaking of all, is the devastating impact the move is having on young players with the Clontarf Bulls, a team of boys and girls with autism, Down Syndrome and other special needs, who are trained and given one-to-one mentoring by club coaches every Sunday morning.
The club — which has close to 700 children playing from undersix to under-18 and where the likes of Brian O’Driscoll and Joey Carbery started out — has been in chaos since its shock eviction from St Paul’s, but the Bulls have been the worst affected.
Set up 18 months ago, they are comprised of 30 special needs children aged six to 11. They had exclusive use of the enclosed, allweather home rugby pitch but now they’re being forced to share the pitch with the 150 children turfed off St Paul’s, with devastating repercussions. ‘Our Bulls are nervous,’ says club chief Brendan Smith. ‘It’s taken us a long time to get here — some of them wouldn’t get out of the car for weeks and their parents had to coax them on to the pitch so it was crucial they had this pitch to themselves.
‘Now we’ve had to re-absorb 150 kids on to this one pitch on a Sunday morning and the Bulls are being forced to share it.
‘They are being pushed into a corner to the extent that some are getting upset. The Bulls aren’t the most robust and if an under-10 comes crashing into a six-year-old with special needs, it can cause huge problems. Even though they have one-to-one coaching — they need to be marshalled lest they go wandering — we’re concerned for the Bulls’ safety now they’ve the other kids in on top of them.
‘All this is affecting their confidence too. It’s absolutely mayhem on a Sunday morning, we’ve had to bring in guys to direct the traffic at the end of the lane.’
Like many of the other clubs, the rugby club didn’t object to the original Marlet plan back in 2015 as ‘we were told we’d be taken care of — that was when they were cosying up to everyone’, says Smith.
‘We feel we were extremely badly treated. Our licence usually runs to the end of the season in March/ April but in December we were told our licence would be subject to a month-by-month extension. Then they informed us they weren’t renewing it and we were removed from the pitch on December 31. It’s causing dreadful problems.’
Gerard O’Rourke is a father of two daughters aged eight and nine who play football and camogie with Clontarf GAA. He is also a vocal campaigner for I Love St Anne’s and Dunluce Residents Association.
‘There’s nowhere for anyone to play — all the teams are totally lost,’ he says. ‘It’s not just about sport — before the fence went up you could run or ramble across and it was all very much part of the community and a footprint of the park.’
The playing pitches did indeed once meld with the rest of St Anne’s Park in an uninterrupted expanse but ten years ago the Vincentian Fathers — school patrons and landowners — erected a green fence around the pitches.
That alone drew criticism from Dublin City Council for its impact on the park’s visual character. If Tom Crean’s plan gets the goahead, the entrance to what is quite rightly listed as one of the ten best parks in Europe will be irrevocably changed, with houses lining the avenue and multi-storey apartment blocks rearing up behind. ‘It will be monstrous — the scale of this mass housing is dwarfing and unnerving,’ says Senator Aodhán Ó Riordáin. ‘This muchloved community amenity is simply too precious to be destroyed by developers. Life is short and parks are precious and for people trying to find the balance between the drudgery of work and the ability to walk into a public park where everyone is equal and can bring their family into this beautiful space, no developer should be allowed take that away to make a quick buck.’
The overwhelming public response has seen the angry sports clubs joined by residents’ associations, environmental groups, families and locals who all made submissions to An Bord Pleanála — at a cost of €20 each — and marched in the recent protest.
Some are worried about traffic congestion, others fear the Nanikin River, which often floods, bursting on a grand scale, with the added volume from the new, as yet unserviced development. Bird lovers and environmentalists fear the many species and wildlife who make St Paul’s and the surrounding area their home, also face eviction.
Among them are the light-bellied Brent geese, whose populations are dwindling. At certain times in the afternoon, the sky over St Anne’s Park darkens as a cloud of these geese move from their roosting patches on North Bull Island to feed on St Paul’s fields. In 2016/17, the largest flock in the country was recorded here, 1,530 birds, by Scott Cawley, leading ecological consultant.
But for most people, it’s the thought that the character of one of Dublin’s most prized and sacred parks, designated as an institutional community space, could be built on by a developer that sickens the most.
When contacted by the Irish Daily Mail, a Marlet spokesman said: ‘There are currently 27
‘The scale of the housing is unnerving’ ‘I’m hoping we can ultimately buy back the land’
pitches in St Anne’s Park available to the community.
‘A further three pitches at St Paul’s were licensed and made available at the discretion of the landowner in recent years.
‘During construction the 27 pitches will remain available but pitches at St Paul’s will not be available until construction is complete — a very modest reduction in pitch availability.
‘When the project is finished there will be two new all-weather pitches, one of which can be divided into two, floodlit, and available 365 days a year unlike the current ones. There will also be a new sports hall allowing for indoor football, basketball, badminton etc and a new fully-equipped gym.
‘We have consistently engaged with the local sports clubs over the past two years and they have known that this development was going to happen, and the changes it would require.
‘We regret the necessary limitation on the use of the St Paul’s pitches until the construction is complete. When the project is complete there will be enhanced sports facilities available to the community, as well as badlyneeded new housing.’
Smith, for one, is not convinced by the pledge.
‘Those plans aren’t fast-tracked like the housing proposals so it could take years and we’ve seen no detail about those fields being guaranteed for future use by local clubs yet,’ he says.
Having taken the temperature of their electorate, all of the local councillors came together in an unprecedented show of solidarity to pen their strong opposition to the plans in a letter to An Bord Pleanála.
Of course, pitched against the escalating homelessness crisis, objectors are being accused of ‘NIMBY-ism’. But they strongly refute this.
‘The housing crisis is a convenient argument,’ says Ó Riordáin. ‘The developer is trying to create as much profit as he can, and he’s entitled to do that but not at the cost of this community and it’s much-loved park.
‘I am pro-housing and defend applications where they are appropriate — in property-zoned land.’
But it is this key point that gives the campaign group I Love St Anne’s and most of the community reason to be optimistic they will triumph.
The fields that make up the proposed site are in an area zoned Z15 which, according to Dublin City Development Plan 2016-2022, stipulates is ‘to protect and provide for institutional and community uses’, with housing among the uses that are ‘open to consideration’.
Deirdre Nichols, of Clontarf Residents Association, claims: ‘The DCDP clarifies that “open to consideration” uses may be permitted where An Bord Pleanála is satisfied the proposed development “would be compatible with the overall policies and objectives for the zone, would not have undesirable effects on the permitted uses, and would otherwise be consistent with the proper planning and sustainable development of the area”.
‘Any proposal for large-scale residential development that removes these lands for use as a community facility for education and as open space is clearly not compatible with these permissible uses.’
She added that the fact it would be no longer available to the community or the St Paul’s pupils as an open space makes it incompatible with the rules, as well as the concern it would hinder any future expansion of St Paul’s, should the need arise.
‘The proposal is also inconsistent with the “proper planning and sustainable development” in the area due to its scale, lack of services as well as all the many environmental reasons,’ she insists.
Senator Ó Riordáin adds: ‘We’ve plenty of sites zoned and serviced and ready to go so let them build there. You can’t argue about Z1 residential zoned but Z15 is very different. Adding what will essentially be a small village on zoned land would totally undermine the integrity of the city’s development plan and zoning.
‘I’m hoping we can ultimately buy the land back for the community, that’s my long-term hope.’ The St Paul’s fields are bounded on three sides by St Anne’s Park and were once part of the former Guinness Estate, originally home to Benjamin Lee Guinness.
By the late 1930s, the land had been inherited by Bishop Plunkett, from whom Dublin Corporation bought it by Compulsory Purchase Order in 1938 for residential and amenity use, with the bishop keeping Sybil Hill House and 30 acres of parkland.
After a number of acquisitions and land swaps between the Vincentian Order and Dublin Corporation, the Vincentians began selling off some of its land for housing — first came The Meadows development in 1981.
St Paul’s swimming pool was sold for housing in 2007 and in 2015 the order sold the 15 acres of playing fields to the Marlet Property Group for a reported €17million.
The site with planning permission will now be worth many multiples of this.
Pat Crean’s Marlet Property Group, a commercial property development group backed by M&G, the investment arm of Prudential, which has seen total investment of over €500million, is an emerging major player in Dublin’s development boom, steering projects all over the city.
Among them are a 16-acre site for 1,500 units in Tallaght, four separate schemes at sites in Harold’s Cross, Bluebell and Cabra Road in Dublin, a student accommodation complex and a 183-unit project in Tyrellstown. It also bought Blocks A,B and C of the Charlemont Exchange Office, where it’s planning a €100million development project, spent about €22million on the O’Dwyer brother’s site near Jervis Shopping Centre in Dublin and is leading the Grand Canal Harbour Project.
Meanwhile, over at An Bord Pleanála, extra staff have been drafted in on overtime to grapple with the deluge of more than 1,100 submissions opposing the development, for which the deadline was Monday.
All eyes are on the planning board as St Paul’s is the first major case to be dealt with under the Planning and Development (Housing) and Residential Tenancies Act 2016 — new legislation whereby all 100plus unit developments bypass Dublin City Council to refer straight to An Bord Pleanála.
A spokesman admitted: ‘We’re under the cosh as we’ve never had to deal with something on this scale. These are the guinea pigs as we get our systems in place and people look to see what to expect under the strategic housing legislation but like all new legislation, it takes time to bed down. But we knew this was going to happen, there are always things to be ironed out.’
The decision by An Bord Pleanála will be final and is due at the end of April.
Until then, the crowds have been silenced — on the sidelines at St Paul’s at least. But locals are determined to ensure their voices are heard elsewhere.
‘It’s like a Rubix cube at the moment, trying to accommodate all our kids,’ says Brendan Smith. ‘But we’ll keep going — you have to. You can’t tell kids no, they just don’t understand.’