The national conference centre proposed for Spencer Dock is a Trojan Horse for the "sad and impoverished" plans for the rest the site, a Green Party councillor told the planning appeal hearing yesterday.
Mr Ciaran Cuffe, who is also an architect, said Dublin deserved a national conference centre but he had "grave concerns" about the height and bulk of the remainder of the proposed residential and commercial scheme. "Its massively bulky development, proposed within a residential low-rise neighbourhood, is too high a price to pay for Dublin," he told the Bord Pleanala oral hearing.
Mr Cuffe is one of eight parties appealing Dublin Corporation's granting of partial planning permission for the project, which is anchored by the £105 million national conference centre.
He said city councillors had voted for refusal of the development, apart from the conference centre, before planning permission was granted last summer.
Mr Cuffe said it was "premature" for the corporation to grant planning permission for the scheme in advance of a high buildings study to be delivered to it next summer.
He said he did not believe there had been any concerted effort to involve community interests in considering the scheme. "The people that Dublin Corporation represents have been put aside in the consideration of this plan and the dialogue has been between the corporation officials and the developers."
The scheme proposed a "dull and mediocre" roof profile, apart from the can-shaped roof of the conference centre, which was "a very limited acknowledgement of the need to provide interesting roof shapes for the city," he said.
Mr Cuffe added that he was concerned at the lack of social housing in the scheme, in which a semi-state body, CIE, was involved as a member of the developer's consortium.
A Fine Gael councillor, Mr Gerard Breen, who is also appealing the decision, said the conference centre represented only 5 per cent of the total scheme. The enormous development would "hit the nerve like a dentist's drill," he said.
Prof F.X. Martin, the environmental activist who died recently, had said a city should have a reminder of its mistakes, he said. "We already have it with Liberty Hall. But the national conference centre will intimidate Liberty Hall with its bulk and will itself be dwarfed by the accompanying development.
"It's ironic that, in Dean Swift's Dublin, Spencer Dock is proposing a model of Lilliput. But we are the Lilliputians."
A small group of residents from areas close to the proposed scheme held a protest against high-rise developments outside the Gresham Hotel before the hearing opened.