Richard Boyd Barrett: Cherrywood Repeats Past Planning Mistakes

Yeah, look, I know you're sort of reluctant to comment as you put it, oh sorry, sorry I thought you were, I know you're reluctant to comment on particular developments but I'm obviously keen to get to the bottom of Cherrywood and I just think it's emblematic of something bigger because it is literally the biggest residential development in the country and if we can't get it right there I don't see how all the talk about planning is meaningful at all because the whole point about the strategic development zone was we were not going to repeat the planning mistakes of the past, right, we weren't going to do Ballymun building loads of flat complexes and not have the amenities and services, we weren't going to do West Tala of building loads of houses and not having the services and amenities, Cherrywood was going to be different. So my question is, is there not some concern that we are now looking down the barrel of a situation where we're repeating the same mistakes and for all the new planning reforms and whatnot, there's a big hole in the ground where the town centre was supposed to be and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. Or we talk about we need better planning for sports facilities and yet we are looking down the barrel of a situation where all the local sports clubs want AstroTurf pitches but what we might actually get, because private developers want it, is a convention centre and an ice hockey rink built by private developers, which is not really the priority for the area or based on no data. Or if you take affordable housing, I don't know if the Department of Finance has any concerns about this, in Cherrywood they got 13 million LIHAF funding and we were supposed to get affordable housing for that, right? Not a single affordable house. And Dunleary Ratdown cannot tell us are we ever going to get affordable housing. Now LIHAF funding was conditional on delivering affordable housing. We got some social housing, but LIHAF originally was going to be 40% for LIHAF, 40% of the housing was going to be affordable, that disappeared. Then it was going to be at least equivalent to the 13 million spread across the development. Never appeared, never appeared. Now there's a new infrastructure fund, a billion fund, are we going to get anything for it, right? So, I mean, I'm just asking, is that of concern? If we can have all the best plans, strategic development zone plans, amending planning legislation, but in the end, private developers can just stick up two fingers to everybody and say, well, we're not building the town centre, you're not getting affordable housing, and you might want AstroTurfs, but this is what we're building. We've definitely gone way over time. Sorry, sorry, sorry. But it is our intention that we would have mentioned at previous meetings that we would be inviting in local authorities in to the Housing Committee over the next year, and that might be an opportunity when Dunleary Ratdown were in to put the question. But I'm saying from an overall planning point of view, if private developers can just do this, and doesn't it sort of make the plans meaningless? You know, is that like, in any situation? Do you want to come in on that? Just a very quick remark on this. Cherrywood, obviously, is a strategic development zone, as I said, a planning scheme drawn up by the local authority, approved by Abort Planola, etc. And, you know, it's a major urban area, as you know, better probably than I do. And its delivery is, if you like, over multiple development plans. And I think one of the challenges that large projects like this have to grapple with is that you're dealing with changing circumstances, changing dynamics and so on. So, for example, it would have been a feature of a lot of the strategic development zone schemes in their first iteration, effectively in the early 2000s, that there would have been a very significant town centre, a retail component in it. And as we all know, that sort of space has changed very significantly. And I'd be aware from other SDZ schemes, like in Adamstown and so on, there's been a need to figure again, if you like, what is the right fit in relation to the retail piece? Because, obviously, so much retail has gone online. There's, you know, a lot of changes have happened in relation to the retail sector. So, I'm not familiar, Deputy, with the very specifics in relation to Cherry with SDZ, but I suspect that there may well be a piece of refiguring, I suppose, that sort of scale of the retail piece. In fact, you know, holding on to the retail centres we have, the town centres we have, is going to be the challenge of the future, rather than building whole new retail centres, because of, as I said, changes in relation to demand in the sector. But I do know Cherrywood has seen a lot of social infrastructure provided, I was looking again on the maps just up to Heronscourt Lane and so on, some really, really good quality infrastructure. But we'll do our work and we're happy to report back and engage with the committee in future in relation to what we found in the summer. All right, thank you.