Making quick decisions
by P. Lanner

Public bodies are often accused of moving slowly. However in the case of the new VEC schools proposed for Dublin 15, one cannot accuse Fingal County Council’s planning department of dragging its collective feet.

Under law, all planning applications received by a local authority must be decided within two calendar months of the date of receipt. With the large volume of applications being received, it is almost invariably the case that most decisions are made in the final few days of that two month period.

However in the case of the recent planning applications for Scoil Choilm and Scoil Oisín, the county council pulled out all the stops. Such was the speed of its decisions that the file hardly got a chance to sit on anyone’s desk for more than a few minutes at a time. One could certainly be forgiven for suspecting that some sort of “fast-track system” came into play in both cases.

The application for the Scoil Choilm site in Kellystown (aka “West of the Porterstown Road”) seeks permission for a two storey 16 classroom building, with a total floor area of 2550 m2 on a 2.4 acre site. The application also proposes a 50 metre temporary access road from the Porterstown Road into the site. This application was lodged with the county council on February 5th and five weeks and two days later, permission was granted.

The application for Scoil Oisín on the old Phoenix Park Racecourse, north of Deerpark Drive proposes the building of a two storey 8 classroom building with a total floor area of 1050m², on a 3 acre site. A new 350 metre long access road to the school is also proposed from the N3 overpass.

It took even less time to decide on the applications to build Scoil Choilm – possibly because it was only half the size! This application was lodged on Thursday February 7th and exactly five weeks later, to the day, permission was granted.

Bearing in mind that under planning regulations, any member of the public may object to a planning application within five weeks of the application being made, one might wonder what would have happened had such an objection been lodged in the case of Scoil Choilm on the final day for making such an objection – Thursday 13th March – the same day that the council granted planning permission. Would the permission have been rescinded to allow consideration of the objection? Would the objection have been deemed invalid for some reason or another?

As it happened, an objection was in fact lodged by OMS architects, for Flynn & O’Flaherty, developers of the racecourse site. They expressed concerns “about the appearance of the cladding [on the new school building] and how it could integrate with the proposed Phoenix Park Racecourse development.”
The architects requested that these matters be “taken into consideration when making a planning assessment.”

It might be churlish to wonder if similar issues regarding finishes were taken into account when making a planning assessment of some of the apartment blocks on the racecourse site, but that’s a matter for another article.

However one wonders how much consideration was given to the architect’s concerns. Their objection was delivered to the planning department by courier on Monday March 10th. Three days later the decision to grant permission was made.

The school site in Kellystown has been the subject of much concern in the area. This land is being made available for the school site in return for a rezoning decision by then council that will allow the developers build up to 2,500 additional homes in the area. This is the third attempt to have the lands at Kellystown rezoned.

Recent reports to councillors on the matter have constantly referred to the school site as being in Porterstown or Diswellstown – anywhere but Kellystown. Singing from the same hymn sheet, the Department of Education & Science also referred to the site as being “West of the Porterstown Road” in its recent planning application.

It’s a pity then that in an engineering report accompanying the planning application, consulting engineers Barrett Mahony let the cat out of the bag by referring to the school as being located in Kellystown.

Planning applications (including ones that took the full statutory two months) have been refused for similar inconsistencies.

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