Mr. Brian Power:

On the Ballinteer project, as has been outlined previously, the school opened in September 2012 in the grounds of St. Tiernan's community school on what is a 13-acre site in that area owned by the Department. It is a very valuable site in an area where it is difficult to get any other sites and our objective was to maximise both the site and for the school itself. Outline planning permission was applied for to the local authority in 2012. It was refused. We went to An Bord Pleanála which upheld the refusal. We went back to the county council with a new outline planning permission application and again the issue was about access onto that site from the roads around Ballinteer. It was deemed by the county council not to be safe and to impede traffic so again it was fully refused. We went back to An Bord Pleanála for the second time and it pointed out to us that what it would welcome in this particular case would be co-operation between the local authority and the Department in any future planning application to maximise the possibility of the success of the application and to ensure a co-ordinated approach overall on access to this education broad campus.

At that point a site selection report was undertaken by our engineers who came up with 18 possible routes into the site. In fairness, four of those routes were on foot but 14 were possible for some vehicular access onto the site. Again, we went back to the county council with that and it picked out one preferred site. The county council had particular concerns about the site. There are protected structures on the site. There is a Victorian walled garden and other structures also. Unfortunately, the preferred council access for the site was alongside the walled garden and we had to have regard to that, but it also fell into the ownership of two third party outside owners.

We went back to the council with new plans for it to examine and it asked us at that point, and this is now 2015-16, to return with a full report from a conservation architect to examine the impact of the route on the protected structures on the site. At that point, we engaged a consultant architect. We drew up the report and went back to the council with new plans. We also engaged with the third parties and it emerged at that point that one of them had proposals on which, unfortunately, we could not reach agreement. It is a property owner, a new developer, and he had particular reasons for looking at the site in a particular way, which would impact on the school. From our point of view, the school was the priority but we had no access into the site. On foot of the fact that we could not find agreement with that third party and we found full agreement with the other third party, the project has been given to the rapids team. They are working with their consultants on examining the means of access and egress on the site with a view, as I understand it, to going back to the council with a full planning permission application. Arrangements have been made with the council for it to go into pre-planning on that basis.