Deadline closes for further legal challenges to 1,000 affordable Dundrum homes

Construction has started on almost 1,000 homes at the former Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum, south Dublin, which has been beset by planning and legal challenges since it was first planned five years ago.

The Irish Times reported on Friday that the Land Development Agency paid more than €2 million earlier this year to buy a dormer bungalow from a local developer who had taken a High Court challenge against the State’s flagship housing scheme.

Mark Leonard, who owned 36 Friarsland Road, Goatstown initiated judicial review proceedings in February. He withdrew the case a fortnight later. It was the second legal challenge Leonard had taken to the agency’s plans for the site.

The house is one of more than 20 on Friarsland Road that back directly on to the site. The agency has not bought any of the other houses. Time has since run out for any further legal challenges to the planning permission for the scheme.

Speaking at a sod turning event at the site on Friday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, while not addressing the specific case, said the State had incurred “excessive costs in the courts for years on a lot of projects” as well as significant delays in the ability to provide homes due to planning and court challenges.

“Government wants development at pace, and one of the key areas that we’ve been focusing on in the last 18 months has been the speed of delivery, accelerating infrastructure, not to end up in the courts on a prolonged basis,” he said.

As to whether the State was setting a dangerous precedent by paying “go-away” money to end challenges to the development of sites, Martin said the agency had been in a position where it made a “judgment call” in balancing the need to provide homes for “thousands of people” against any issued related to the purchase of a single property.

“I don’t know is that go-away money,” he said. “Every specific issue is a judgment call by those involved at the coal face in respect of any particular development.

“I think what’s important here is we have a site with 1,000 homes about to be built. For years we’ve been going on in this country about the delay, delay, delay. You know, we’ve got to get moving, get things done.”

A total of 934 homes, almost all of which will be apartments in blocks of up to eight storeys tall, will be built in the estate, which is now called Dún Brí. Most (753) will be cost-rental or affordable purchase homes aimed at low and middle-income workers, as well as 181 social homes.

The first are expected to be available in the second half of 2028, with the full estate completed in late 2029 or early 2030. The State-subsidised cost-rents and sale prices for affordable purchase homes will not be set until closer to completion dates. However, Land Development Agency chief executive John Coleman said the average rent across its 3,000 cost-rental homes completed to date was €1,450 a month.

The split between the number of cost rental and affordable purchase homes had yet to be determined, Coleman said, but most would be cost-rental.

When it published its master plan for the site in April 2021, the agency had hoped the first homes would be available in 2024 and that the scheme would be completed by 2028.

Coleman told an Oireachtas committee last year that the first court challenge delayed the plans by two years and added “at least €30 million” to the €400 million project cost. This was the equivalent of putting at least €30,000 on to the cost of each home.