Ballsbridge residents have called on Dublin City Council to "abandon in its entirety" a draft local area plan (Lap) which it brands as "a developers' charter which ... will irreparably damage the character and heritage of the area".
An umbrella group for 14 residents associations in Ballsbridge, which includes some of the most desirable houses in Dublin, said they had "unequivocally rejected" the plan as being "wholly inappropriate" for the area.
The area plan was drawn up by Urban Initiatives on behalf of the city council in the wake of property developer Seán Dunne's acquisition of the Jurys and Berkeley Court sites and his ambitious plans for a high-rise scheme to replace the two hotels.
However, the residents say the proposed rezoning of "substantial tracts of land" - including the hotel sites between Pembroke Road and Shelbourne Road - "is entirely unnecessary" as Ballsbridge already has all the amenities appropriate to its character.
In a lengthy submission to the council, they say the proposed "very substantial increase" in plot ratios (the scale of development relative to the area of a site) to as high as 4:1 in some cases "would destroy the character and heritage of the area".
"It is simply not acceptable that poor planning decisions in the 1960s and 1970s, which resulted in a number of excessively high buildings, should now be used to justify even more excessively high buildings which are . . . out of keeping with the character of the area".
The residents associations say they wish to "avoid a repetition of a number of bad planning decisions in recent years", citing the Four Seasons hotel, an office development on Simmonscourt Road and the new stadium at Lansdowne Road as examples.
The scale of shopping envisaged by the local plan would, they say, "convert a residential area into an urban area and generate substantially-increased traffic volumes on an already overburdened road network".
The residents claim that the plan failed to take "proper account" of other infrastructure in the area that they believe is inadequate, including water pressure, sewerage, drainage and flood protection.They also object to a requirement that new buildings should front directly onto the footpath, and take exception to the proposed removal of railings at the front of the RDS to open it up as a public space.
"The Lap is a fatally flawed document. Not only do its proposals fail to respect the residential character of the area, but they will result in irreparable damage to what is recognised throughout Ireland as a beautiful and historic area."
The residents associations involved represent Aylesbury Road, Anglesea Road, Ballsbridge Wood, Churchill Terrace, Lansdowne and district, Lynton Court, Nutley, Sandymount and Merrion, Sandymount Avenue, Serpentine Avenue, Shrewsbury Park, Simmonscourt Castle, Sydenham Court and Upper Leeson Street.
