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free to over 30,000 houses in Dublin 15 |
| New
primary school to be located in the Kellystown greenbelt The
Dublin 15 Community Council welcomes the application for planning permission
for the new VEC Primary School, St. Choilm. However, the deal that has
been struck regarding its location gives us cause for concern. For many years the Dublin 15 Community Council has actively lobbied Fingal County Council, the Department of Education and all our local elected representatives on the ongoing need to provide reserved sites for both primary and secondary schools. From our analysis it was reasonably foreseeable some years ago that we were going to face an ongoing demand for new schools throughout the Dublin 15 area. Yet despite this, the various responsible parties failed to provide the now required sites in a timely and proactive manner. Hence because of these ‘delays’ and failures in the system, we have now arrived at a situation where the only viable option available to enable us to build our needed primary and secondary school sites for the Castleknock/Diswellstown area are on the greenbelt lands at Kellystown. The previous attempt to rezone these lands indicated a residential zone to the north and an amenity zone to the south. Some months ago the community council approached various politicians and council officials to voice their concerns at this apparent development. We requested that if these lands were to be developed then the school or schools should be built in the residential portion of the lands to the north of Kellystown and that the southern part of Kellystown should be reserved for recreational and leisure use by the community. What we were looking for, on this occasion, was community gain in relation to the use of these lands and not a further repetition of past development in the area whereby the developer was by far the winner. To date the developer who controls these lands and who has built many hundreds of homes in the Diswellstown/Clonsilla area, has not yet provided a site for any school in this area. Allied to this is the failure of that developer to deliver in a timely manner the public open space that they were required to hand over having developed, sold and completed several estates. We are all acutely aware of the general absence of suitable places for the many thousands of residents in Diswellstown to recreate. The trend in recent years is to locate public open spaces some distance away in the greenbelt, leaving minimal amenities within estates. While in planning terms this may offer some protection to greenbelts, the painfully slow delivery of these recreational areas and playing fields is a cause of major concern for residents associations and sports clubs alike. We wish to see an end to these one sided arrangements. This time we want to see real community gain emerge from any arrangement that Fingal County Council and the Department of Education enter into with the developer. It is vital that our various elected representatives also assist this process and ensure that we, the community, get a ‘fair deal’ on this occasion. Charlie
Kurtz is the chairperson of the Dublin 15 Community Council
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