Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 8 March 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Urban and Rural Regeneration: Discussion (Resumed)

Ms Lisa Clifford:

Two projects were approved for Fingal in the second call. The major one was the regeneration of Balbriggan. Deputy McAuliffe is correct that €40,000 was given to Fingal to do the feasibility study on the Dunsink site. It is with a view to seeing what needs to be invested to develop that site in the future. There are two aspects to that. The first is the development of the site, but the council also needed to undertake a number of environmental surveys on the site to see the extent of investment that might be needed going forward.

To go back to a point Ms Graham made earlier, our next call is focused on town centre first, but thereafter we will have a call that is focused on the cities, and it will look to those large-scale, strategic sites that need to be developed and the suite of infrastructure that might need to be put in place there. We have a number of those feasibility master planning projects in train that will feed into the larger capital projects going forward. The Naas Road is another example.