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Rezoning for Mammon

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March/April 2022 19scheme is purely for rental and does not meet the need for local residents and their community for housing which is integrated and provides for people of mixed incomes as well as appropriate social housing. The scheme includes provision for the required 10 per cent social and 10 per cent afordable housing.Rory Hearne of Maynooth University said the “mega build-to-rent scheme would essentially be a private enclave set apart from the local area, owned by overseas institutional investors”.“This is a reversion of 100 years in the social progress of land ownership and is part of a race to the bottom in the Irish housing system”.It also appears to confict with an assurance by former Archbishop Diarmuid Martin in advance of the, Vatican-approved, Clonlife sale that the priority for the diocese was “to ensure the buildings and lands would be used for the beneft of the local community and a legacy for the city of Dublin”.The land deal certainly benefted the Church and the GAA which hailed it as the best in its history and “the key achievement for the year, if not the decade” in 2019. “The Archbishop was very anxious that he would sell to the GAA and he really wanted to deliver a social and afordable housing complement to that part of the city,” explained GAA stadium and commercial director, Peter McKenna. a hotel, two new pitches, a clubhouse and ofce facilities on the 11 acres it has retained from the land deals. Instead of helping to resolve the housing crisis, as the church says it wants to do, many of the 120 parties who objected to the Hines application have argued that it will exacerbate the emergency.The €610 million Hines plan proposes 12 apartment blocks ranging from two storeys to 18 storeys in height on the former site of the former Holy Cross seminary and college.Among those with reservations was Dublin City Council which said that it was disappointed with “the disappointingly high quantum of single aspect and studio and one-bed units” which, it argued, “is not considered appropriate to the area and could constitute an unbalanced form of development”. DCC said the proposed 71 per cent of studio and one-bed units within the scheme “is alarming” adding that “it is considered unlikely the development will provide an attractive mixed-use sustainable neighbourhood….in compliance with the Dublin City Development Plan 2016-2022”. The local authority did not, however, recommend against the planning application.What must also concern the Catholic Archdiocese is the criticism of the Clonlife and Croke Park Residents Association that the The move by the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin to alter the zoning of lands where 33 churches are located across the city has once again raised the question of its potential role in the provision of afordable and social homes in the midst of a deep housing crisis.In mid-February, it lodged a 130-page submission in response to the Dublin City Council development plan opposing zoning rules which preclude housing or office developments in all but “highly exceptional” circumstances on such lands.In the document, solicitors Mason Hayes and Curran claimed that “the proposed changes are unlawful insofar as they affect religious institutions such as our client”.Some of the churches “are located in disadvantaged areas where the delivery of housing is taking priority over additional institutional land uses”, according to the planning consultants Brock McClure, which contributed to the church submission.The development comes after a request last year by housing minister, Darragh O’Brien, to the Catholic archbishop, Eamon Martin, to identify vacant buildings or lands which are owned by the Church and could be used to alleviate the housing crisis. In response, the retired bishop of Killaloe, Willie Walsh, agreed in August 2021 that the church should be doing everything it could to help address the housing crisis.“I would have always had the attitude that church land is not private property. church land is land belonging to the people. The people involved in the church. It is not belonging to the bishop or parish priests or that sort of thing. It is the people’s land and I think that anything the church can do to help the housing situation I think it should be there and trying to do it”, Walsh said.All well and good. Since then, however, the Dublin Archdiocese has come under intense criticism over the circumstances surrounding its sale, in 2019, of a 31.8-acre site at Clonlife Road to the GAA from which it netted a reported €95 million. According to its fnancial report for 2020, the Catholic Archdiocese received a further sum of almost €3 million due to a to a clause in its contract with the GAA that it would receive “a share in the profts made by the GAA if they sold on any of the lands or buildings to a third party”. The allocation followed the sale of 19 acres of the lands by the GAA to US investment fund Hines which has been granted planning permission by An Bord Pleanála to build almost 1600 ‘build to rent’ apartments on the site. It is understood that the GAA received €105 million for the lands it sold to Hines and plans to provide NEWSRezoning for MammonThe Catholic Church had high ideals in getting its land rezoned but there is little sense its Clonliffe lands will be used for the common goodBy Frank Connolly

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