“We have 52 nationalities in this school,” says Adrian P Flynn, who is principal of Adamstown Community College, which has 980 students. “It’s diverse, multicultural, and multi-faith.”
Among the many countries his students and their parents have come from are Afghanistan, El Salvador, Georgia, Ghana, Japan, Nepal, the Philippines, Romania, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Turkey, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. With so many diverse backgrounds and cultures, how do the staff unite the school and find common goals for its students? “We encourage a sense of belonging,” deputy principal (one of three) Shane Comiskey says.
Adamstown Community College, which is under the Dublin and Dún Laoghaire Education and Training Board, surely has to be one of the most diverse schools in the country. The school reflects the diversity of Adamstown itself, a planned town, now 20 years in the making. It was in February 2005 that the first element of development commenced at this location, 16 kilometres from Dublin city centre. The area comes under the aegis of South Dublin County Council. It was to be the first new planned town in Ireland since the establishment of Shannon in Co Clare in the 1960s.
Adamstown has its own railway station, with frequent services to the city centre. It costs €2.60 for an adult single ticket from Heuston Station, and the journey takes under 20 minutes – a considerably shorter time than it took me to drive there from the city centre on another occasion. The thinking behind developing the town was to reduce the dependence on cars by encouraging the use of public transport, and to build high-density housing, with a focus on apartments.
The last census in 2022 recorded some 10,000 people living in Adamstown. The original development plan, along with a railway station and schools, included a large community centre, a cinema, library, swimming pool and various shops. The economic crash in 2008 impacted on the development, slowing it down. Until recently, a sole Londis supermarket served the community. The planned cinema, swimming pool and library have not yet materialised. A Tesco and Aldi opened in 2023. Other shops and services have only opened in recent months.
I’m in the library of Adamstown Community College, talking to Flynn, Comiskey and John Hassett, who has been on the board of management since the school opened.
“The school isn’t a melting pot,” Hassett says. “It’s more of a mosaic; an integrated mosaic where each part brings its own difference.”
The college opened in 2009, and it, along with the two primary schools, served as the de facto community meeting spaces, as the adjacent community centre itself wasn’t to open until 2018. “There was no way the community could assemble other than through the schools. That integration at the beginning was so important,” he says.
“The school came before the building of the community,” Flynn says. “In other places I worked, like Swords, the community would always have been there first before the school. This school grew organically with the community. It’s only now the school is hitting its capacity, which is about 1,000.”
“In the initial years, our students came from Lucan,” says Comiskey. “Now most of the cohort from the school walk to school.”
“One of the signs of a community maturing is that we now have a tidy town committee,” Hassett says.
Since 2018, the school has shared the facilities of the adjacent Community Centre.
“We had no PE hall until the community centre opened,” Hassett says. “And when you think of the weather in Ireland ...”
Between the hours of 8am and 5pm, the school can use the centre’s gym, PE hall, cricket nets and all-weather pitch. The school’s musicals are held in its hall.
“It was always going to be a shared resource, but it isn’t big enough to meet the needs of the community right now,” says Comiskey. “It is a smaller version of what it was meant to be. This school started in a boom and then went into a recession.”
I spend some time walking around Adamstown. The only commercial centre is focused on an area called The Crossings, which is directly opposite the railway station. Most of The Crossings is newly opened. There is parking for 400 cars, the Tesco and Aldi that opened two years ago, and a barber’s shop, a veterinary practice, a pharmacy and a cafe called The Belfry, which opened before Christmas. The 15 other empty commercial units on the ground floor are still awaiting new businesses. They all have apartments overhead – 900 in total.
There’s also a central playground area, focused around a “train” on which children can play. There are some seating areas with wooden canopies overhead, where construction workers are having lunch. “Creating space for community” reads one hoarding. “Work, Live, Play” reads another.
The town is a very linear place. The arrow-straight railway line is parallel to the three schools, all built in a row, gable on to the railway line, and leading to The Crossings. There is an Educate Together primary school, and St John the Evangelist primary school beside it. I don’t see a scrap of rubbish the entire time I’m in Adamstown. A public library is due to open in the next couple of years, and is currently at the design phase.
The community centre opened in 2018. Gemma Pintor, who moved to Ireland from Spain in 1997, is its manager. In 2006, she bought a four-bedroomed house at Adamstown for €500,000 and moved from Clondalkin with her family.
“We bought into what they [the developers] were selling: the boulevards, the cinema, a safe place to raise our family, where our children could walk from home to school. But then development stalled during the recession.
[ Is Ireland’s planning system broken?Opens in new window ]
“Even to build the community centre took more time,” she says. “It opened in 2018. Originally it was going to be two storeys high and double the size. It still can be, hopefully in the future: it’s been built so another floor can go on top. Adamstown is not what I hoped it would be, but I am happy here. I didn’t expect to be in negative equity three years after buying the house, but it is my home. We probably only got out of negative equity recently.”
Pintor tells me about a friend’s daughter, who recently spent two nights sleeping in her car as she queued for three days to buy a house in a development at Airlie Park. “There were eight houses for sale and 100 people interested in buying. She and her husband are both hospital consultants.” Her friend’s daughter got the house: a two-bed for €400,000.
There are a wide range of classes available at the centre, including English language classes. On the day I visit, members of the community from Turkey, Ghana, Ukraine, Algeria and Pakistan have all availed of a morning class.
“Most people in Adamstown are the ‘new Irish’,” Pintor says. “We were not born in Ireland but we consider Ireland our home, and our children are Irish. As for me, my head is Spanish but my heart is Irish. Adamstown is like the United Nations: the whole world in the one town.
“My child was telling me about his friend Ahmed recently, and I asked where Ahmed was from. He replied, ‘The Paddocks’ [a local housing estate]. Children don’t see nationalities. They don’t see the colour or the race.”
Amelia Lupascu, Alex Cunningham and Nathan Silveira are all transition year students. Lupascu’s family came here from Moldova, and Silveira’s from India. They came to live in Adamstown in recent years, while Cunningham has “lived in Adamstown my whole life. We bought the house before it was even built. I’ve seen everything being built. It was pretty weird, to be honest, looking out at fields, where now there are houses and people.”
“Adamstown is being developed and modernised each year,” says Lupascu. “The older part can get very congested with the traffic. I play volleyball, but I need to drive to get to my club.”
“It would be good to have some clothes shops and sports shops here,” Cunningham says.
“Everyone is so friendly, and from diverse backgrounds,” Silveira says. “One of my favourite things is the sense of community here. You’re not just being taught in a classroom; you are learning from others.”
“My mum looks through the windows to see what other people are cooking,” says Lupascu. “Adamstown is a big town, but quiet. We have a walking group that goes out and picks litter. Everything is very convenient. We have the train station and the bus stop there too.”
Among the properties currently for sale at Adamstown is a two-bedroomed, two-bathroom apartment of 82sq m on Adamstown Way for €335,000. A terraced house of three bedrooms and two bathrooms of 135sq m at Castlegate Chase is asking €440,000.
Rentals include a one-bed apartment at The Crossings for €1,895 a month; and a three-bed, three-bathroom apartment at the Paddocks Square for €2,700 a month.
Xinyan Chen (13), who goes by the name of Chen, and twins Aislinn and Ailish Facto (15) are members of the community college student council. Xinyan’s family is from China, and the Facto twins are Filipina. They all three came to live in Adamstown when they were small children.
Do they know it is a planned town?
“I watched the community centre being built,” says Ailish. “I am definitely more aware of the town now; that it is planned. Everything was fields when we moved here first. The Crossings was fields. You can see the construction around you as you grow up. Compared to Lucan, Adamstown feels more modern.”
“Adamstown is really welcoming. They are very accepting of the LGBT community,” says Aislinn. “Everything is very convenient, and in walking distance. We see people from all over the world here.”
“Adamstown feels quite safe. There is a really low chance of something happening to you here,” says Chen.
Dick Gleeson is a former city planner with Dublin City Council. “Adamstown is an attempt to bring back the basic principles of good urbanism: that streets would be connected, rather than ending in cul de sacs. It’s about the idea of neighbourhood: you should be able to walk everywhere, and use public transport to get around,” he says.
“Adamstown has a reasonable centre. There’s a front-loading of schools, a variety of housing, and most importantly there is public transport. There’s sustainable density, with a network of accommodation on interconnected streets. There are a lot of things right about Adamstown.”
The key developer working at Adamstown is Quintain, which has been involved since 2016. At that time, 1,400 housing units had been built, and development had been much curtailed after the economic crash.
“Prior to the crash there were 1,400 units built at Adamstown,” says a spokesperson for Quintain. “In more recent years, Quintain, Tierra and Cairn were all actively building homes and contributing to the infrastructure. In total, the three housebuilders have built almost 3,680 units. This brings the total number of units built at Adamstown to over 5,000 units: the Quintain team directly has built almost 2,200 units.”
Quintain is in the process of building 1,600 housing units, and says there are a further 1,300 in the planning stage, with a project completion date of 2028.
The spokesperson also said: “Quintain has agreed a sale of a former commercial building to the Health Service Executive [HSE] to provide a primary healthcare centre at The Crossings. Quintain obtained a change-of-use planning grant for a health centre and are currently on-site refurbishing and upgrading the building to HSE standards. It is due to be handed over to the HSE in the first quarter of 2026.”
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis
