Community: victim of planning corruption

Neilstown was originally mooted for a town centre development. But this idea later moved to Liffey Valley. Neilstown has suffered ever since

At a meeting in Neilstown in North Clondalkin on the western edge of Dublin, on Monday evening (5 December), Tánaiste Mary Harney told local residents she would look into their concerns about the location of a new library.

Officials have been looking into siting a library in North Clondalkin since the late 1970s. A library was built in the early 1980s, but was used instead for a garda station.

When Noel Dempsey, then Minister for the Environment and Local Government, launched the RAPID programme in 2001, the north Clondalkin library was a priority project.

There is still no library. What there is, now, is a brash, modern "town centre" for North Clondalkin. It's called Liffey Valley. It contains 85 stores, has parking for 3,500 cars and expects 1.6 million people to visit over the Christmas period, ten million over a year. Mary Harney was meeting constituents in Neilstown because they object to the latest plans for their local library – that it be sited in Liffey Valley.

The tension between the objectives of Liffey Valley and the needs of the surrounding estates of North Clondalkin has been evident since Tom Gilmartin first touted the idea of building a vast retail complex at the edge of the anticipated M50 motorway and N4 Dublin-Galway road in the late 1980s.

Since 1972, Dublin City Council's development plan had identified a site in the heart of the area for a new town centre, to be called Ronanstown. The site, known as Neilstown/Balgaddy, lacked an access road, which would have been part of the development requirements, but its geographic location was ideal to serve the surrounding communities. This was to be home both to retail and social development, both of which remained almost totally lacking in the area until relatively recently.

But Liffey Valley – on the site Tom Gilmartin first identified at Quarryvale – killed it off. Once Liffey Valley was assured planning permission, the economic incentive to develop Neilstown/Balgaddy was gone.

As part of the process of securing support for the Quarryvale development, developer Owen O'Callaghan developed proposals to site a national stadium on the Neilstown lands. Nothing ever came of this.

The proposed Neilstown town centre was replaced with a massive shopping complex, aimed at people in cars with disposable income, extending its catchment area for a radius of up to 50 miles but with little to serve the local communities.

Community workers say they were promised that there would be a supermarket included in the Liffey Valley development – but the closest they got in the centre was a Marks and Spencer foodstore. The developers "were looking to create a mix (of retail) that was different from other kinds of centres", says Aidan O'Hogan of Hamilton Osborne King, who has been involved in the centre's development. Meanwhile, the surrounding areas did not have a supermarket at all until the opening a few years ago of a Londis in Neilstown, which was joined by a Supervalu in Rowlagh last year.

Local residents complain that the pedestrian routes into the centre are inadequate, involving long walks along barren streets with heavy traffic and dangerous crossings. Whereas the Balgaddy site is in the heart of the area, Liffey Valley is, says Andy Lane of the local community development association, "on the edge of the world almost". The association has sought to have CCTV installed on the roads and new pedestrian crossings. The closest of the housing estates, Quarryvale, is just a couple of hundred metres from Liffey Valley – but to get to it directly would involve mounting a high wall around the estate and crossing a dangerous road. Instead, residents must take a long walk around.

The huge traffic volumes going in to Liffey Valley block up the entrances to the nearby estates and slow down the already poor bus service. The bus service consists of the 78A, which goes into the city centre through Ballyfermot, and an hourly service, the 76, linking Neilstown with Ballyfermot and Tallaght. The Maynooth train line runs through Clondalkin station but, according to Andy Lane, the service is poor and the station is badly signposted and not well known.

North Clondalkin was neglected for years before the relocation of its town centre away from Neilstown to Quarryvale, says Andy Lane, and "what has been built carries on that neglect".

North Clondalkin has a population of 22,000 people, according to the 2002 census. The census area covering north Clondalkin also takes in some neighbouring, wealthier areas, so Lane cites the census figures for one of the estates, Rowlagh, which he says reflects the situation in the others. Thirty seven per cent of the local population have just primary or no formal education, double the county average. Male unemployment is 14 per cent, compared to 5.7 per cent across Dublin as a whole. Seven per cent of people go on to third level education. Unemployment has improved in recent years but, says Lane, this is largely in the "low-paid economy". Liffey Valley has made some contribution: according to a 2004 survey, some 55 per cent of the 2,900 staff in Liffey Valley live in the North Clondalkin/Lucan/Palmerstown area.

RAPID has brought some funding to North Clondalkin, says Lane, but it is piecemeal, and tends to prioritise more imaginative projects. What the area needs, he says, is more money for basic upkeep, such as repairing footpaths and street cleaning.

A prior source of community project funding was the Urban initiative, launched with EU funds in 1997. But this provided setup funds for a three-year period, and organisations have struggled to replace this with state funding since.

A programme designed to help children make the transition from primary to secondary schooling, to combat the high drop-out numbers, was funded under Urban and then by the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs. But it didn't fit neatly into the funding criteria of the department, and nearly lost its funding earlier this year, with staff being put on protective notice. "We actually spend a lot of our time struggling to defend services from withdrawal of funding," says Lane.

Economic development has brought change to the area, and whereas up to five years ago or so there were shops lying empty in Rowlagh village, there are now plenty of local shops – though still none of the "very large, competitive supermakets", like a Tesco, Aldi or Dunnes. There is still no bank outside of Liffey Valley, and the closest thing to a restaurant in the surrounding community is the coffee shop in a local community development centre.

Local youth worker Eddie Darcy says the area has seen significant improvements in recent years, and there is a strong sense of community activism and pride. The library remains a symbol of that community's neglect, though: "Thirty years into its development, a community of 20,000 people doesn't even have a library," he says. Siting a library inside Liffey Valley will, ironically, help to fulfill the original intentions of the developers that it would be a town centre, with social and leisure facilities as well as retail. But it remains a town centre with its back to the surrounding suburbs. Liffey Valley is the "the least beneficial location for the library", says community worker Marie Grogan, who fears that a Liffey Valley library will remain accessible only to those with access to transport, and will never be a community facility.