Architect Hugh Wallace has taken a “build first, ask later” approach to his own great house revival in Portobello, Dublin 8. The Home of the Year presenter is putting the finishing touches to the restoration of an 1890s-built, end-of-terrace home in Dublin 8 that he bought for €300,000 four years ago after it was damaged by fire.
But the big reveal in his planning file shows that it deviates quite a bit from the original plans submitted to Dublin City Council, with the livingroom, bathrooms and bedrooms all in different places than planned. Now Wallace is seeking retention permission for the works carried out without consent, including amendments to the boundary walls, an increase in floor area by 7sq m, the removal of a chimney, the addition of a gable window to the north and “elevational alterations”, including moving windows and changing the size and location of doors.
“The changes instigated have a minimal overall impact, but generally a positive one,” the planning documents submitted by him state, adding that the extra space was needed for “storage requirements” and to “maximise the functionality” of the house.
Wallace will be hoping the council’s planning department agrees and gives him a high score when they run the rule over his new digs in the coming weeks.
Council to run the rule over Portobello house revival as Hugh Wallace deviates from the plan
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Victoria House on Ailesbury Road in Dublin 4 would be a definite contender if its new owner entered RTÉ's Home of the Year. Set on the sunny side of the road, the restored Victorian pile extends to 550sq m and has a south-facing garden designed by Bloom-gold-medal-winning landscape architect Jane McCorkell. In July it sold for €10 million, the highest price paid for a property inside Dublin’s canals this year.
But who would live in a house like this, as Lloyd Grossman used to ask? The buyer turns out to be Michael H Burke, a vet-turned-businessman who built up Galway-based Chanelle, a global pharmaceutical company, over the last 40 years. Burke is one of the few people in the country who won’t be sweating over the purchase price; he sold his pharma company, named after his daughter, who is married to former jockey AP McCoy, for a reported €300 million in February.
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Politico has taken aim at an EU project that is planning to open “Europa Experience” centres in all 27 member countries modelled on the Parlamentarium in Brussels, the European Parliament’s visitor centre. It reports the project has “cost millions and is way behind schedule”. Only 15 of the centres, which feature high-tech cinema and “role-play games”, have been finished, and the parliament is now getting cold feet about pouring more money into them, as it has already spent €110 million, and each centre can cost up to €3 million to run. The priciest so far was in Chatham Street in Dublin, where the “initial investment” on the building and fit-out was €13.4 million. You’ll never beat the Irish.
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Fontaines DC, the Dublin punk quintet, aren’t quite at the stage of buying rock star mansions yet, but the boys are certainly in a better place financially than they were in 2021 when they had to claim Covid-19 supports to keep the wolf from the door after the live music industry collapsed.
New accounts filed by their Irish company, 32 County Love Train, show they made a profit of €354,539 last year, bringing their cash reserves up to €426,485. Dead Beat Descendant, a UK-based company owned by the five members, has another €130,000 in reserves. The group, which played a series of sold-out homecoming gigs in Dublin’s 3Arena earlier this month, seem to be doing okay out of the great rock‘n’roll swindle.
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Congratulations to Fergus Boylan, from Portrush but now living in Bray, who won the coveted Political Cartoon of the Year in the UK at an awards ceremony in London last week, beating off competition from the likes of Steve Bell of The Guardian, Morten Morland of The Times and Ireland’s Graeme Keyes.
Boylan, who posts online as @InfiniteGuff, drew the cartoon for The London Economic magazine, depicting Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg as museum artefacts, alongside a dinosaur and a dodo.
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Folk singer Joan Baez, the one-time collaborator and partner of Bob Dylan, was in the Lighthouse Cinema last week for a Q&A following a screening of her searingly honest documentary, I Am A Noise, directed by Irish film-maker Maeve O’Boyle. Baez told interviewer Olivia O’Leary she was “happiest doing the activism and music at the same time”, referring to her time on protest lines, including marching for peace in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
“When I was in Ireland during the Troubles, I was comfortable then singing because I was deeply involved in the social change that was going on, and the singing was almost the sideline,” she told the event, hosted by lawyer Bill Shipsey’s Art for Human Rights.
A full-throated Baez was joined on stage by an Irish supergroup – Glen Hansard, Hozier, Paul Brady, Damien Rice and Mary Black (among others) for a rendition of On Raglan Road, with Baez plucking President Michael D Higgins, a guest on the night, from his seat to join the band on stage. The two 83-year-olds fronted a rag-tag collection that compensated for some dropped Patrick Kavanagh lines with a 1960s energy that might even have stirred Dylan.
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The potential of one of the new slate of TDs elected at the general election was spotted by Irish Times reporter Barry Roche earlier than most. In 2019 Roche visited the Patrician Academy in Mallow to interview students about delays in building new classrooms at their school after 11 classrooms were gutted by fire three years earlier.
Sixth-year student Eoghan Kenny, sporting a full beard, had written on behalf of the students to Minister for Education Joe McHugh seeking a firm commitment that building would commence in the coming months.
“For nearly three years, not one single block has been laid on the school site, illustrating the lacklustre response from your department. Do you think this is good enough?” he wrote to McHugh.
The same Eoghan Kenny, still keeping faith with the beard, was elected for Labour in Cork North-Central last month at the age of 24. A future education minister?
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