Dundalk is a city in waiting. A town with fine streets, impressive public buildings, a county museum and a large urban area, it has suffered hugely in the past 30 years due to the troubles in the North. Now, there is great hope that peace will remain and have a huge knock-on effect on this town's future. In some ways, indicators are already positive, with plans by Xerox to expand its operations in an 80-acre industrial park on the Dublin Road. Plans are afoot for more high tech industries to take space in this IDA industrial park.
Aidan Donnelly, managing director of Xerox and president of Dundalk Chamber of Commerce says "Dundalk has been reasonably static for quite an amount of time and it hasn't seen the inner city renewal that Kilkenny and Galway have seen. However, the stabilisation of the North has led to confidence and potential for development.
"Xerox and ICL coming into the town has added to this. There has suddenly been a demand for housing over the last 18 months, with people moving into the area and others trading up."
Housing developments are planned for areas to the north and east of the town, with some industrial developments also expected in the west of the town, bordering the new MI motorway. Planning applications for housing/commercial developments in Dundalk increased by over 40 per cent from 1998 to 1999.
A campus-style development of offices, which will include the recently-built county council offices, decentralised government offices and companies such as ICL, is also underway, as is another industrial park, which will incorporate 25 acres of a retail park.
A new sewage treatment plant due to come into service next month will have the capacity to service all of these planned developments, and a population of 50,000. Dundalk currently has a population of 27,000. The Long Walk shopping centre, with Superquinn as its anchor tenant, is quite conveniently linked to the town centre by a line of shops and a very impressive bus station. There is also talk of a multiplex cinema to be built in the town.
Currently, traffic flow in the town and parking are problems which need to be addressed. The urban council is keen to hear from those interested in building a multi-storey car-park in the town. The town centre is in need of further revitalisation. A visitor to the town is left with the impression that, like in Dublin in the 1970s and 1980s, many people have moved to the suburbs and former city homes have been turned into offices.
