If things had happened differently, East Point Business Park could now be a STOLPORT (a short take-off and landing airport), or an industrial warehouse park with ancillary offices.
Timing was crucial in its incarnation as a high-tech business park - although in many ways that timing was forced upon the developers, Earlsfort Centre Developments, who experienced a series of frustrating delays spanning several years before the park got underway.
When Earlsfort bought the 27-acre site before the boom in 1990 for £3.75 million, there was a hazy idea it would be a mixed warehouse/office park. The previous owners had shelved plans for an airport and the poor economic climate meant it took Earlsfort some time to get the £15 to £20 million capital needed to kick-start the venture. The banks regarded it as high risk.
Legend has it that the late Dermot Pierce, then chief executive of Earlsfort and the visionary behind the park, after walking a number of bank officials around the site in an effort to persuade them of its potential, exclaimed "It's all a pile of shite, isn't it?", breaking the tension and reducing the bank officials to tears of laughter. In the end, Anglo Irish Bank stepped into the breach.
Pierce had "fantastic faith" in the ultimate success of the park, says Matt Gallagher, chairman of Earlsfort Centre Developments. But the long wait proved an ill wind.
During the long planning stage, the focus began to shift from industrial warehousing. The market was on the brink of change and the developers began to receive enquiries from international software companies looking to locate in Dublin.
While the economy began to show signs of improvement towards the mid-1990s, according to Gallagher, they had little inkling of the unprecedented boom to follow. The park got off to a slow and cautious start although East Point's designation as one of two enterprise zones in the city didn't hurt.
Before they could begin building office blocks, they had to spend £2 million constructing an access road over the Tolka estuary off the Alfie Byrne Road, and install drains and sewers. Bounded by the Tolka river to the north, Dublin Port lands to the east, East Wall Road to the south and Alfie Byrne Road to the west, on reclaimed land, the site lay derelict and unused prior to development.
The land had been reclaimed by Dublin Port and Docks board during the 1960s and 1970s using a mixture of builders' rubble and domestic waste. Engineers O'Connor Sutton Cronin had to deal with methane gas, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide emissions, and with numerous soil and groundwater contaminants. It was the first major redevelopment of this type of site here.
Each building in the park has a gas monitoring unit and there is an on-site monitoring suite and off-site monitoring centre.
According to the engineers, "all the buildings are designed to prevent gas entering the inside but a strategy has been developed to deal with any unusual or high reading under or within a building."
To consolidate the landfill, all the structures in the park had to be supported on precast driven piles.
In 1995, the first 64,000 sq ft building was bought by four investors for £7.25 million and pre-let to ACT Kindle for £9.50 per sq ft. The company proved a valuable launch customer and was quickly joined by Oracle.
The first phase was bought mainly by private investors and business consortiums lured by attractive tax incentives, some spending as much as £15 million on office blocks. Sun Microsystems and joint venture partners America OnLine and Bertlesmann were also early customers.
When Kindle moved in, it was given an option on air conditioning but chose to go without. Its rent is up for review and will probably rise to about £17.50 per sq ft, the current going rate. Air conditioning now comes as standard in the Scott Tallon Walker-designed office blocks.
The developers hired Charles Funke to landscape the park and say they spent in the region of £40,000 per building. Funke had previously worked on Stockley Business Park outside West London.
Earlsfort has retained two buildings in the park. There are 23 buildings in the first phase totalling 700,000 sq ft of office space and with an estimated value of £70 million. International companies now make up 60 per cent of tenants. There will be a total of nine buildings in the 11-acre extension currently under construction, of which only one is still available.
The existing park has a rent roll of £14 million a year between office and car-parking spaces, which cost £675 per year. The future looks bright: the developers have applied for planning permission for a further 90,000 sq ft of office space but according to Matt Gallagher, they won't get complacent. That the economy will take another downturn is "a racing cert", he believes.
"Anyone who has been through a recession knows how bad it can be. At one time we had an office in the Earslfort centre which lay empty for a long time. Things are going well now but with I can see a potential oversupply situation developing."
