In announcing plans for its latest regeneration project yesterday, Dublin City Council provided a further demonstration of the kind of civic commitment to more socially-deprived areas of the city which has characterised many of its recent initiatives.
The council says this latest development - a major new town centre for the Cherry Orchard area - will involve the construction of some 5,000 new houses and apartments over the next five years. It will centre around the existing Park West industrial, commercial and residential complex and an adjacent 25-acre council-owned site, and will involve a heavy emphasis on affordable housing.
In an area where developers would have feared to tread just five years ago, the council is in the process of identifying a preferred bidder out of six tenders for its existing site. A railway station and town plaza will be built by the company behind the Park West site, with 40 per cent of the 6 million cost funded by the council. The overall investment is expected to exceed 2 billion by the time the entire development, including a hotel and supermarket, is finished.
The project is at the upper end of the scale of a series of developments through which the council has sought to improve the quality of life in some of the more deprived areas of the capital by transforming the civic environment. These include its investment - also in Cherry Orchard - of €6 million in an equestrian centre. This extensive facility - an RDS on a community scale - is transparently a good thing, especially for the young people of the area. The same can be said of the marvellous new civic centre in Finglas which includes a block of local area offices, a well-patronised swimming pool, a much-needed crèche and a centre for young people at risk, or about the St Catherine's Foyer and Community Sports Centre in the Liberties.
In the case of Cherry Orchard, the plans announced yesterday set a new benchmark in the design of higher-density affordable housing. The case for building so many new homes four or five miles from the city centre rather than 40 or 50 miles away, in Dublin's grossly extended commuter belt, is beyond argument. Plans to make engulfed historic villages such as Finglas more coherent in urban design terms are also very welcome.
The tragedy for so many potential home-buyers in Dublin is that this is all coming very late in the day, after large numbers of people have been forced out of the city by exorbitantly high property prices; and that social facilities which should have been provided years, even decades, ago are only now beginning to materialise.