Dublin City Council approves 11-storey hotel on Abbey Street Upper

Dublin City Council has given the green light for an 11-storey high hotel building on Dublin’s Abbey Street Upper.

The 252-bedroom hotel is part of a mixed-use scheme by applicants Abbey Street DevCo Ltd that also includes a 10-storey, 222-bedroom apart-hotel fronting on to Great Stand Street.

The scheme also includes two retail units at ground-floor level.

The grant of planning permission for the mixed-use scheme follows An Bord Pleanála refusing planning permission for a build-to-rent apartment scheme comprising 227 apartments at the site in December 2021.

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In recommending planning permission for the new hotel and apart-hotel, the city council planner concluded that the proposed development “would assist in the regeneration of a vacant site, and would provide for active uses on to Great Strand Street and Byrne’s Lane and create new connections between Great Strand Lane and Byrne’s Lane”.

The planner’s report also concluded that the proposed development “has been designed to avoid overlooking of adjoining developments, both existing and permitted”.

Underlining the scale of the scheme, the city council has ordered the firm to pay planning contributions totalling €3.48 million towards public infrastructure and the Luas C1 line scheme.

The sole objector to the scheme was former environment editor of The Irish Times, Frank McDonald.

In a strident six page objection, Mr McDonald told the city council that “I do not anticipate that anything I have written above will make any difference to Dublin City Council’s planning assessment of the proposed development, which is just another glaring example of the incessant grinding of a mill bent on turning Dublin into an Anywhere City”.

Mr McDonald stated that “as Dublin City Council is well aware, Dublin is in the midst of a housing crisis. Yet numerous potential development sites in recent years have been sacrificed for the interests of tourism – whether hotels, ‘apart-hotels’ or hostels – while virtually the only model for housing, foisted on successive ministers for housing and planning by the property lobby, is build-to-rent, usually over-scaled and over-dense schemes based on a high-rent regime that relatively few can afford”.

Mr McDonald stated that what is emerging is a “high-rise cluster in Abbey Street Upper and Great Strand Street, in defiance of the Dublin City Development Plan 2016-2022, which made no provision for such an eventuality”.

Planning consultant for the scheme, Tom Phillips + Associates contended that “the development of this viable, long vacant brownfield site will enhance the character and coherence of Abbey Street Upper and Great Strand Street”.