This article is part of Ireland’s Changing Suburbs, an Irish Times series exploring our fast-growing new towns, changing older neighbourhoods, and shrinking rural landscapes. As part of the series, Fintan O’Toole writes about ‘the commodification of Crumlin’
“It’s like having roommates rather than children. It’s kind of unnatural in a way, and my heart breaks for them. I shouldn’t know everything about their life. They should have their own independence.”
Angela Kettle has lived in Dundrum most of her life, but she knows the generation coming after her will not be able to say the same thing. She and her husband built their home in the back garden of his parents’ house in the late 1990s, and now all three of her adult children are still living at home.
One son is doing a masters to become a teacher, another son is doing an electrical apprenticeship and her daughter has just started an Arts degree at UCD.
RM Block
Kettle does not see a way out for any of them without leaving the country.
“They’ll never be able to buy, not just in Dundrum but anywhere in Dublin at all,” she says.
The Dublin suburb she grew up in has changed irrevocably since she was a child.
What was once a thriving village, with shopfronts hosting the same name for generations and a growing community thanks to the large-scale local housing expansion of the 1960s and 1970s, has since become somewhat empty and stuck in time.
The biggest eyesore on main street is the old Dundrum shopping centre, built in the 1970s and left largely vacant since the arrival of its shiny, and comparatively colossal, new neighbour the Dundrum Town Centre in 2005.
The majority of local commerce was slowly subsumed into the new town centre, leaving the village with several vacant shopfronts alongside a growing housing crisis.
The Dublin 14 suburb suffers from the same dearth of housing seen in the rest of the country, and yet it has struggled to pivot from its current state of stasis.
The old shopping centre site has the potential not only to rejuvenate the main street, but also to provide hundreds of new homes.
In 2022, German insurer Allianz and property developer Hammerson, which co-owns Dundrum Town Centre, sought planning permission for 881 apartments on the site.
The development included 11 blocks of apartments, one of them 16 storeys high, as well as cafes, restaurants, a creche and some shops.
It spanned the entire site of the old shopping centre as well as a number of old buildings on main street.
The plans attracted over 700 objections from concerned locals, who variously described it as “appalling”, “destructive”, “a visual catastrophe”, “a vertical sprawl”, “an eyesore”, “a concrete jungle”, “monstrous” and “a developer’s dream”.
Dundrum is one of many established suburbs in Dublin to have seen an intensification of housing in the form of apartment block construction over the past two decades.
Over the last 10 years, 42,904 apartments have been built in county Dublin, with almost half of those being in Dublin city.
“Residents of these established suburbs have mixed views on how their suburbs are changing. Some welcome these new blocks in the hope that more supply will bring down house prices and that perhaps their children will eventually be able to live near them. It hasn’t happened yet,” says Lorcan Sirr, housing lecturer at TU Dublin.
“Others have concerns around the impact of thousands of new residents on the fabric and stability of their communities, worried about the transient nature of their inhabitants.
Earlier this year, An Bord Pleanála rejected the Dundrum plans after raising concerns around its architectural impact, flooding, and living conditions for future occupiers.
Warren Logan, who like Angela Kettle has also lived in Dundrum his whole life, objected to the plans on the basis that the 16-storey block would be all he would see when he opened his front door on Sweetmount Avenue.
“I’m not a Nimby [Not in My Back Yard],” he says, explaining he simply felt the scale of it was too big for the area, and he would have liked to have seen something lower, eight or nine storeys high, and with more green areas and amenities for locals.
“If apartments are going to be there, why can’t we just make it beautiful? Make it a nice complex, because it’s going to be there for 100 years,” Logan says.
Acknowledging the need for more homes, Warren says he would be happy for more accommodation to be built in the area, but sums up the central problem with that site.
“The struggle here is that you have Hammerson who essentially want to take out the village and turn it into accommodation, and you have residents and traders who want to keep the village,” he says.
“Change is needed, because housing is needed. But we need to look at how much consultation are we going to receive in a relationship to that change,” Logan says.
Nick Armstrong is a member of the local community group Imagine Dundrum, which campaigns for better planning and balanced development that is respectful of local heritage.
The group’s “whole aim is pro-development,” he says, rejecting the idea of Nimbyism.
“There’s a lot of things we voted for and we really support, but when it’s not right, we talk against it.”
The group campaigned heavily against the Hammerson-Allianz plans for the old Dundrum shopping centre site, saying that it was too high, that it did not have enough civic amenities and that its housing mix did not meet the needs of the local population.
“We’re for development – but we’re not for wrecking the town. And there is a difference. We want to see this developed. Our biggest worry is now that this won’t be developed in any reasonable timescale,” Armstrong says.
The group would like to see building heights of no more than eight storeys on the site, blocks built around garden squares and a mix of terraced houses and apartments.
Keeping the architectural heritage of the older buildings on main street, many of which are owned by Hammerson and formed part of the redevelopment plans, is also very important to the group.
“We want to see the main street developed in a harmonious fashion that blends in with the local heritage. We would like to see more small shops at ground level, with flats above. We want to see businesses, civic facilities and things like that along the bottom, and the flats above. Living above the shop is a really important thing now,” he says.
Walking down main street now, however, paints a much different picture. He points out several buildings which are in an architectural conservation area and are currently lying vacant, if not derelict.
“We do dereliction really well in this country.
“That’s why we want the development, and we want people living there. When it will happen, I have no idea,” he says.
Another significant housing development in the area, on the site of the old Central Mental Hospital, is an example of how good community engagement can achieve a majority buy-in from locals.
In May 2023, the Land Development Agency was granted planning permission for the construction of 852 homes on the 13.7-hectare (34-acre) site.
Everyone we spoke to in Dundrum agreed this development was well laid out, had a good mix of units, and that the LDA had listened to locals’ concerns and made amendments where they could.
However, despite all of this legwork, the project is now tied up in a judicial review process due to one single objector.
So what is the impact of this local objection on the people looking to live in the area, and how can the suburb move forward?
“The big demand here is for family houses and for family units. Unfortunately, because of the nature of that site, it is only ever going to be apartments,” says local estate agent Darren Chambers of the Old Shopping Centre site.
“What the town needs on that site is residential property, but I think it also needs a mix of retail to try and drive footfall and maintain the village essence, and the importance of the village as a centre of commerce, a place to do business,” he says.
An average three bedroom semidetached house in the Dundrum area is currently selling at about €700,000 to €800,000, he says.
The number of those units on sale at any one point in time has also dropped significantly since the pandemic, he says, from about 120 pre-Covid to around 70 now.
“The challenge Dundrum has had over the last two decades has been inertia, because development has been stalled and the village as a result has been suffering,” Chambers says.
While development stalls, young people are being pushed out and generations will be reared many miles away from where their parents grew up.
Sitting at her kitchen table on a bright November day, Kettle cannot see how her own children will be able to live anywhere as close to them as she and her husband did to their parents.
“It’s devastating. I know people of my age now who are becoming grandparents, and they have to go to Australia to visit their grandchildren.
“Years ago, you could drop your kids into the grandparents who would mind them for a few hours. Now you have to Facetime with them on the other side of the world,” Kettle says.
“That whole connection of family, and I think as Irish people family was always very important, that has been lost.”
