Una Mullally: Planning system conspires to paint out murals

During the pandemic, the Irish artist Emmalene Blake aka ESTR, repeatedly made international news thanks to her brilliant, uplifting, and joyful murals in Kingswood, Dublin.

Around the country, it at least appears that large format public artwork has been thriving in various ways. In Cork, the Ardú project, supported by Fáilte Ireland and Creative Ireland and Cork City Council, led to a stunning collection of murals colouring the city. In Waterford, the Walls Project, now an international street art festival, is set to take place again this August.

There are now over 100 murals in Waterford, and the project has extended to rural areas around the county. Ireland’s best-known contemporary pop artist, Maser, began his career as a street artist. And the artist Aches has painted incredible murals in Dublin and elsewhere, which has rightly brought him international acclaim. There are many more celebrated Irish artists who began painting on outdoor walls.

And yet, the planning system has still found its way to tangle artists and people who commission them up in knots. In the depths of lockdown in January 2021, Cathy McGovern, who lives in Sandycove in Dublin, had a plan. Inspired by a conversation with a guide on a street art tour in New York in 2019 who told her about the Irish artist Solas, she approached Solas to paint a mural on her house. The result is a stunning painting of ballerinas. “They represent triumph over adversity,” McGovern told me, “Because of the whole Covid context, I thought they were ideal.” When the work was completed in the summer of 2021, McGovern was delighted. So too were her neighbours. “I’ve had massive amounts of positive feedback,” she said.

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Retention application

But within a few weeks, she received an enforcement order telling her to take the mural down. She hadn’t secured planning and, unlike other cities, Dublin’s approach to mural work means that people are highly constricted, even when they want to paint their own private residences or when they have permission from a building owner. McGovern went about sorting it out. She engaged with a local architect and asked him to do the planning retention application, which the council rejected because “they wanted all kinds of drawings of my house, including drawings of the back of my house. So I had to pay for all that to be done to then submit a retention application that they accepted.” That application was submitted on December 10th, giving the council two months to respond. On February 10th, they did. Her planning retention application was turned down. She is now appealing to An Bord Pleanála.

The reasons she was refused planning like visual art itself are all subjective

The reasons she was refused planning – that the mural on her house is visually incongruous, that it adversely impacts the visual amenities of the area, that it depreciates the value of properties in the area and that it sets an undesirable precedent – like visual art itself are all subjective. But here we are. A woman who was trying to spread some joy and beauty through a frankly gorgeous artwork by a talented and established Irish artist for the whole area to enjoy has now spent more money on navigating this archaic system than she did commissioning the original mural.

Around the same time as McGovern’s Solas ballerina mural was born, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council declared that Dún Laoghaire town “will become an open-air canvas for 14 established, up and coming, and local artists . . . Bringing together the best in contemporary art, we are very excited to launch the first project of its kind in dlr [sic].”

Planning process

The initiative, called Anseo, did indeed add a wonderful splash of colour to the town, which seriously suffers from dereliction, parking issues and an absence of nightlife. While it’s fantastic that some councils encourage and facilitate mural artwork in particular areas, one questions why a council can essentially paint what it likes where it likes and yet an individual served by that council can’t.

One questions why a council can essentially paint what it likes where it likes and yet an individual served by that council can't

When I asked the council about what planning process they go through to commission their own murals, a spokeswoman responded that their street art is commissioned through “formal agreements with property owners” and is exempt from the planning rules private citizens have to navigate under section 4 (1) (f) of the Planning and Development Act 2000, which identifies “exempted developments”, if the development is “carried out on behalf of, or jointly or in partnership with, a local authority that is a planning authority, pursuant to a contract entered into by the local authority concerned, whether in its capacity as a planning authority or in any other capacity”. So the council – indeed the system – isn’t actually opposed to murals. It’s that old joined-up-thinking disconnect, a gap clogged by red tape.

Dublin’s strange relationship with outdoor art also made international headlines last week, when the Guardian published a piece detailing how the artist collective Subset is engaged in a court battle with Dublin City Council. Subset gets permission from building occupants and owners for its work, but has been dogged by enforcement orders.

There is a large bit of cop-on missing from our approach to public art. Dragging artists and other individuals through bureaucratic systems – be that planning or the courts – is a colossal waste of time, resources and public money, and it also has a chilling effect on would-be artists. Bureaucracy is the enemy of creativity. We are all being forced to look at incredibly ugly “developments” pockmarking Dublin right now, along with chronic dereliction. Securing planning permission is no mark of something being nice to look at. Beauty – in any context – should be celebrated, not painted over.