Madam, - Wicklow County Manager Eddie Sheehy, in criticising The Irish Times's coverage of the proposed Greystones harbour development is blindly ignoring the big picture (Weekend, March 4th).
Peter Murtagh wrote that 375 apartments was too much to insert into a small harbour such as Greystones; Mr Sheehy's answer is that there will not be 375 apartments, but 230 apartments and 145 houses - which is effectively more than Mr Murtagh said. Mr Sheehy also says it is not true that there will be five-storey buildings in the project, when the developers' own drawings show four-and-a-half storeys over a raised deck - five storeys in anyone's language. The image selected by Mr Sheehy to accompany his article shows a view taken from probably half-a-mile offshore - a vista most residents will never see. Anyway, the bulk of the objections are about the land-side dominance of the development and its impact on the existing listed buildings - a point Mr Sheehy chose to ignore.
What the Wicklow councillors and executive will have to realise is that this development is completely out of scale with the existing small harbour and is seen to be so by the residents and others. If the council feels that the only way to finance harbour refurbishment is to have this privately financed project, why not put it and its 1,000 car spaces and 70,000 square feet of "commercial units" well away from the harbour and just repair the quays? - Yours, etc,
TONY SULLIVAN, Delgany, Co Wicklow.
Madam, - The controversy over the proposed large-scale development of Greystones Harbour is really about different future visions of the town's attractive but dilapidated Victorian harbour and stony beach. Town residents are split over the question of whether the ultra-modern apartment complex, shops, marina, and artificial beach will represent a positive transformation of a valued, and largely unspoilt, public amenity.
Many people in Greystones have a deep attachment to this stretch of the coastline and don't wish to see it significantly altered in any way.
Others feel frustrated with the run-down appearance of the harbour and want to see modern facilities provided for the area, even if these must be funded by building a significant number of apartments. There is nothing unusual about this. Competing public opinions of how our coastline could develop should inform our planning process.
This is why public consultation processes are so important. Unfortunately, any real public consultation on to the proposed Greystones development has taken place just before the submission of planning documents to an Bord Pleanála by Wicklow County Council and the private consortium Sispar. In fact, one could argue that this amounted to a "presentation" of the proposed plan rather than any real "consultation". Many residents are understandably aggrieved.
The Green Party believes that when local authorities propose the significant development of sensitive areas of public amenity, full public involvement in the earliest stages of planning should occur. In Greystones, there is no good reason why a town plebiscite could not have been held so that local residents could have given their verdict on the harbour proposals. Unfortunately, residents have instead been presented with a fait accompli.- Yours, etc,
Cllr DEIRDRE DE BURCA, (Green Party), Bray, Co Wicklow.