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More details have emerged of a massive housing development between Finglas and Blanchardstown which Fingal County Council are now calling the Dunsink City Quarter.
The Council held a one day ‘public consultation’ on the proposal on Monday which lasted for three hours. Some local representatives and community activists have claimed that the exercise was no more than box-ticking designed to sell a proposal that was approved by a large majority of Fingal Councillors when it was included among additions to the County Development Plan in April.
National Party Councillor Patrick Quinlan has attempted several times to have parts of the plan abandoned, but the impression is that even where Councillors have qualms about specific parts of the proposal as it impacts on rezoned green areas, the main parties refuse to be seen to be even questioning of anything that promises to deliver more housing.
Councillor Quinlan – who has been frustrated in his efforts to have Fingal County Council release their own statistics on housing allocation – has addressed head on the issue of who the housing is intended for.
Given the official statistics which show that the vast bulk of population growth is made up of immigrants and that this is projected by the Central Statistics Office to continue to account for 90% of that growth over the next several decades, the logical answer is that 90% of those in need of accommodation will be persons born overseas.
Some available, but closely guarded, statistics on social housing lists already show that immigrants comprise a higher proportion of those waiting for accommodation than their official proportion of the population. There is also growing evidence that social housing and state supported rental accommodation is being allocated to large numbers of people who came here as asylum seekers.
Besides that, anecdotal evidence, and some small statistical sources, would suggest that immigrants who have come here on work permits are buying and renting a substantial amount of the houses and apartments that are coming to the market.
The scale of the plan is off the charts. To the extent that a City is an apt description of what, when completed, will be an entire new settlement. The entire site, now mostly rural fields, covers 435 hectares. When complete the city will have 18,500 accommodation units and a population of 45,000.
That would make it the sixth largest city or town in the state, just ahead of Drogheda and Dundalk. Twice the size of Athlone, Mullingar and Wexford, but with a smaller footprint because most of the housing will be in apartment blocks. We seem to have several multi storeys pencilled in for what is now a pleasant field at the end of my road in which there are horses grazing and soaking up the rays.
I recall during the Covid Panic writing about plans to build a new city, Nextpolis, of 50,000 at one of six proposed sites. It was a project promoted by native agents on behalf of the Hong Kong Victoria Harbour Group and it was intended to be exclusively for immigrants from Hong Kong.
When I wrote about this in 2020, it was regarded as absurd and possibly even invented. I am not sure what happened to the proposal but my comment stands: “What is being planned is not a normal organic growth, but a massive social experiment with no real consideration as to the manner in which it will completely transform the country. In that context, a proposal for a new city generated by overseas capital and largely populated by immigrants is no more fantastic than any of the rest of it.”
Since 2020, we have imported enough people to inhabit six or seven Nextpolises. Given that and what we know of the levels of current and projected immigration is objecting to vast projects such as ‘Dunsink City Quarter’ legitimate on the basis that most of those who will be living in the houses and apartments are not even in the country yet?
What normal society has its entire resources and administrations centred on what are basically the human resources requirements of overseas companies? It ought to be considered no more healthy, normal nor sane were it to be proposed that the population of Nigeria or India or South Africa be placed on an inexorable trajectory that will end with the native born population falling to be a minority ethnic group.
This one is personal to me as it is literally on my doorstep. It has had its moments, as they say, but I have grown sort of fond of the place. Neither I, nor my neighbours, were asked about any of this, given a say in any of this, nor is anyone I have spoken to happy about it.
Finglas itself has a long history stretching back to before the Conquests when it was a renowned site of learning and piety centred on the monastery of Canice Naofa. The monastery was on the banks of the Fionn Glas stream which flows into the Tolka at Finglas Bridge where Dick McKee, the OC of the Dublin Brigade IRA murdered on the eve of Bloody Sunday, 1920, lived.
In another generation it is likely that none of these things will be known to most of the people living in or close to Finglas. And if they do know of them it will be of little or no interest to them. When that happens, what you end up with are not villages or towns or cities but places to store people when they are not at work.
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