Manhattan in Ballsbridge?

What is it with Irish councillors? For years developers have been building ugly housing estates, with no facilities, in the middle of nowhere, and councillors have been bending over backwards to facilitate them - often against the advice of their own Planning Officers. Now a developer proposes a ground breaking, ambitious, and potentially iconic new development on the Jury's/Berkely Court Hotel site in Ballsbridge, within walking distance of the center of Dublin. The proposed development includes a luxury hotel, underground shopping facilities, an "art house cinema", a jazz club, an art gallery, artists' studios, and a European Centre for Culture. With its impressive centre piece an irregular shaped tower, "cut like a diamond", in the words of its architect, Ulrik Raysse, the project has great architectural merit. The reaction of councillors is typically perverse - they don't like it.

The proposed development would providing 536 apartments, many of them large enough for family living, which, as the developer, Sean Dunne stated, would play its part in the need to "halt the drastic, unsustainable urban sprawl of Dublin" all over Leinster. One councillor, Paddy McCartan, said that the proposed development was "a grandiose plan ill-suited for Ballsbridge adding that, if approved "You would seriously end up with Manhattan". Indeed, why have Manhattan when you can have Clondalkin? Why have grandiose when you can have dull and mediocre instead? Mr McCartan also commented that he was old enough to remember attempts to destroy Georgian Dublin, Hume Street and Wood Quay. I think a lot of Dubliners would join with Mr McCartan in decrying the destruction of Dublin's architectural heritage. But, in this instance, only a couple of ugly, outmoded hotels are at stake. Change isn't always bad. councillors would be wrong to dismiss this one out of hand.