Daft Property - Irish Property News

It's time to quiz planners for their part in the crash , says ISABEL MORTON AS THE next few rounds of the blame game get going, including the banking enquiry, one wonders when our 88 different planning authorities and more importantly, our planning appeals board (An Bord Pleanála), will get much more than a sharp slap on the wrist for their part in the property fiasco which resulted in some 300,000 homes lying empty. No doubt individual planning authorities, much like the banks and the developers, were only interested in what was going on in their own back yard, but one would have to wonder how and why An Bord Pleanála upheld permission for so much of what was built during the Tiger days. An Bord Pleanála’s mission statement is “to play our part as an independent body in ensuring that physical development and major infrastructure projects in Ireland respect the principles of sustainable development and are planned in an efficient, fair and open manner”. Surely, as an independent bo

Life for the boom's dead spaces... The Irish landscape is scarred with the remnants of failed or unfinished building schemes from the Celtic Tiger years. GEMMA TIPTON asks some leading architects to use their imaginations and suggest ways to put them to some use. EVEN DURING THE boom, it was difficult to see some of the things we were building and imagine them as a success. Enormous luxury golf and spa hotels in the middle of nowhere, shoe-box apartment blocks in small towns, ghost estates where no houses were ever sold , and massive out-of-town retail and industrial parks – all these have blighted the landscape, and now stand in various stages of construction or dereliction, mocking us with the question: what should we do with them? Some ways out of such waste have already been proposed: turning the hotels into nursing homes is one example. Or we could look to SoHo in New York, where inner-city factories and warehouses became, first, artists’ studios and then ultra-desirable loft

The 210 apartments in the nine-storey Gasworks building, in Ringsend near Landstown - Dublin 4, have been vacant since they went on sale two years ago. Developer Liam Carroll has since got the OK to convert the Gasworks apartments into a 520-bed hotel. However local residents are saying "no" to the plans and have appealed the proposal. Their main concern seems to be they will have to pay for the upkeep of common areas - hotel guests will not etc. The original promotion of the apartments, 2 years ago, by Hooke & Mac Donald mentioned: ...One of the most interesting and significant residential projects ever to be carried out in Dublin was launched on the market... A familiar feature of the South Dublin skylinehas been transformed. The striking metal cylinder of the former gasholder at Barrow Street creates a frame within which a stunning new nine storey block of large two bedroom apartments has been built. The curves of the building complemented by its dramatic glass fa