Sir, - I am writing to say how delighted I am to hear that Friends of the Irish Environment has made a formal complaint against Dublin Corporation's plan to demolish all the Ballymun flats and replace them completely with a low-rise sprawl of new houses. As someone who lives in a similar high-rise estate in Sheffield, and who has lived in a great variety of other housing, I too complained against Dublin Corporation's short-sighted and hasty plans, on the grounds that there are probably more advantages than disadvantages to retaining high-rise housing in present-day Dublin, and that Ballymun has a unique place in Irish architectural history, and may even be worthy of "listed-status" to protect it, as is the case with the Parkhill flats in England where I live.
Firstly, is it not such a pointless waste for the Corporation to demolish what amounts to thousands of units of housing at a time when the Dublin housing market is pricing itself beyond nearly everyone's reach, and with no guarantee that an equal number of homes will replace them on the same site? Many of the large employers around the city and airport would be only too pleased to buy such flats as affordable initial accommodation for newly relocated staff. I remember that back in the 1980s, Dublin Corporation spent considerable amounts of money to improve safety and quality of life around Ballymun, with community facilities, better lifts, and closed circuit TV. What happens to all this money spent on improvements? Is it simply going to be written off - and will the same thing happen in another 30 years when the "new" Ballymun, despite all the so-called experts involved, is no longer what it was cracked up to be?
What Dublin Corporation should realise is that in Ballymun it has a unique asset which, yes, will need money to refurbish, but nothing like the cost involved in total replacement. The tower blocks are perfectly sound structures, and could be economically improved with better security, lifts, roofing and weatherproofing. The majority of these flats could be sold to locals, as private owners - as in the case of any private flats development - feel they have greater responsibility for their surroundings. One or two blocks could easily be converted to student accommodation for the City University, and of course, families and the elderly would be re-housed in lower-rise flats, both refurbished ones and new ones which could be built on some of the space between the existing ones. Because central Dublin is still subject to what I regard as an unfairly draconian height limit, the chances of any more such high-density, high-rise housing being built nearer the centre is nearly nil, and therefore Ballymun should be accredited with far greater value than it is at present.
As it stands, it was a unique experiment in Ireland in high-density housing, which went wrong for many diverse reasons, only a few of them related to the physical shape of the buildings. And it is far more important that we should preserve a 20th-century development, where thousands of Dubliners (including one or two famous writers) have lived and been brought up, than many of those fine Georgian houses which have become merely mute monuments to landlordism and greed during the Famine. There are thousands of "historic" Georgian houses, but there is only one Ballymun! - Yours, etc., Dan J.J. Kahn, M.A.,
Parkhill, Sheffield, England.