Dublin City Council has now cleared the way for Cairn Homes to lodge a planning application for 690 apartments and a hotel on a site it purchased from RTÉ in Donnybrook, Dublin 4.
This follows the City Council informing Cairn Homes in an Opinion that its mixed use plan constitutes a reasonable basis for a 'Large Residential Development' application under new planning rules for large scale housing developments.
Cairn Homes now has six months within which to lodge a formal planning application for the scheme with the Council which includes 274 ‘build to sell’ apartments and 416 ‘build to rent’ apartments.
The scheme also includes a hotel, 17 ‘age friendly living’ units, a creche facility, restaurant and cafe, artisan food shop, residential amenities and associated site works.
In a notice published on Thursday concerning the proposed scheme, the Council stated that "following consideration of the issues raised during the Large Residential Development (LRD) meeting the Planning Authority is of the opinion that the documentation submitted would constitute a reasonable basis for an application for permission for the proposed LRD".
Details concerning the scheme will remain under wraps until Cairn Homes lodges its planning application later this year.
The scheme is considerably larger in scale than the €338 million 614 unit scheme in nine apartment blocks ranging from four to 10 storeys in height that Cairn secured planning permission for from An Bord Pleanala in September 2020.
Billionaire, Dermot Desmond was a vocal opponent of the initial Cairn scheme describing the proposal as ‘Ballymun Towers South Dublin’ in a letter to Dublin city councillors.
However, in March 2021, An Bord Pleanála consented to a High Court order quashing its permission for the Cairn 614 unit scheme.
This followed a High Court challenge by three local residents, Chris Comerford, John Gleeson and Pat Desmond, wife of Dermot Desmond, to the board’s decision to deal with the permission application by Cairn Homes.
The new plan by Cairn Homes comes five years after it paid RTÉ €107.5m for the 8.64 acre site. The developer first commenced its bid to build on the site in December 2018 when it put preliminary plans before An Bord Pleanála.
"Cairn has received a detailed formal opinion from Dublin City Council following statutory pre-application discussions on our proposed mixed-use development at Montrose, Donnybrook," a spokeswoman for Cairn Homes said on Thursday.
"Cairn intends to address all items of the opinion and lodge a Large-scale Residential Development (LRD) planning application to Dublin City Council in due course," she added.
The new LRD system replaces the 'fast track' Strategic Housing Development (SHD) system which allows developers to by-pass Councils and lodge their plans direct to An Bord Pleanála.
The SHD system is currently being phased out. Under the new LRD system, applicants and third parties can appeal Council decisions to An Bord Pleanála.
