Janus Securities Ltd has sought planning permission for a large business and technology park in Celbridge, Co Kildare, in return for the transfer to the State of over 130 acres of parkland surrounding Castletown House, thereby restoring the house's entire parklands. Under the terms of the proposal, Janus will also hand over land on both sides of the M4 motorway for a planned motorway interchange. Some of this land is already under compulsory purchase order. The proposed business park, provisionally titled the Celbridge Business and Technology Park, would have almost 1.2 million sq ft of space on about 85 acres of land adjoining Hewlett Packard and the M4 motorway on one side, and the Castletown House demesne on the other. The permission being sought would not allow for the establishment of heavy industry, rather the park would be aimed at business, services and light industries. Janus Securities, a company controlled by the Rhatigan Brothers and McMullan Brothers Limited, see this development as filling a need created by computer chip manufacturers, Intel, which employs about 4,000 people in its Celbridge plant and Hewlett Packard, which employs 1,500.
Janus said its business park, which could create up to 3,000 jobs over a five-year period, would provide a home for the kind of ancillary, spin-off businesses and services that would normally be generated by international plants of this size, but which have not previously been possible due to space constrictions in the Leixlip/Celbridge area. The levels of development have put a serious strain on the infrastructure in the area - before the M4 motorway was opened some 22,000 vehicles passed through the main street of Leixlip. This was relieved by the motorway but with the new developments, the traffic has reached pre-motorway levels.
The interchange planned by Kildare County Council would introduce new roads serving the Intel and Hewlett Packard plants and a new road to Celbridge. As owners of the land on which the new interchange will be built, Janus Securities is proposing to make the land available quickly and to give what it terms a "substantial financial contribution" which "would go a long way to financing the link road to Celbridge". It is hoped that work on the interchange would start next spring. Any development near a house of such architectural and historical importance as Castletown House is liable to cause raised eyebrows in the heritage world but unusually, the development has the support of Duchas - the heritage service - and the OPW, which owns the house, as well as the Castletown House Foundation.
Castletown House, which is the largest Palladian-style house in Ireland, only re-opened to the public in April of this year following five years of restoration work. Built in 1722 for the then Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, William Connolly, it stayed in the Connolly family until 1965 when it was sold to a developer.
Fears that the house would be pulled down or converted to apartments were allayed when Desmond Guinness bought the house - but not the demesne - in 1967. He handed over control to the Castletown Foundation in 1979, which ran it until the early 1990s, when fears about the state of the house resulted in ownership of the house and of Connolly's Folly, an obelisk dating from 1740, being transferred to the State. The £5 million restoration took place under the management of Duchas, and the OPW.
Although it is not zoned for building, there has always been fears about Janus's ownership of the land to the north of the house, which amounts to some 130 acres. While the main entrance still enjoys a fine southerly view over State-owned land down to the Liffey, all the main reception rooms face north, looking over Janus-owned land on to Connolly's Folly and to another folly to the north-east, the Wonderful Barn. If Janus Securities is granted permission, it proposes that the 130 acres of land surrounding the house be designated amenity lands. Ownership would be transferred to the State and restoration of the lands would be the responsibility of Duchas, which has been involved in discussions with Janus for some years. The heritage service would use a 1739 map to restore the integrity of the estate, including the restoration of the ha-ha, as well as the re-introduction of a Victorian avenue. The land handed over by Janus, with some 100 acres of woodland of the original demesne already owned by Coillte, the national forestry authority, would restore the entire Castletown parklands.
Robert Keane of Anthony Reddy Associates, architects for the proposed development, said measures were being taken to ensure the business park did not compromise Castletown House. "Together with the OPW and Mitchell and Associates landscaping architects, we made a thorough study of the land to ensure that it would be complimentary to the house and that the business park would be as inconspicuous as possible." Lisney is advising the developers.
