A CAMPAIGN TO stop the building of a seawall along the coastline looking out at Dublin Bay and Dollymount has been stepped up by locals.
Campaigners have this week begun collecting signatures to stop what they say is the blocking of “iconic views” of the lagoon, Dollymount and the wider bay area.
Locals are unhappy with what they say is a lack of transparency in the plans, with complaints that they were of the belief that construction works were for a cycle path and not the seawall.
The seawall is part of Dublin City Council plans to have a continuous cycle path running from Sutton to Sandycove.
Planning permission was granted for the work, notices were placed in the area and the plans were on display in the local Raheny library.
But local Fine Gael politician Stephanie Regan says that, “although the planning was done correctly, it was not done well enough in my view.”
“It doesn’t matter if you do it well, it doesn’t feel good. People feel they have been duped,” she says.
The work has been going on for about six weeks now and I think there was a rather null reaction when it began. We all said, “ah there’s the cycle lane”, and then we saw an enormous pipe coming in and we all thought that they were understandably doing some drainage works. But then they saw the wall being built and people started to get concerned.
The works will increase the height of the seawall from the Wooden Bridge at Seafield Road in Clontarf to the Causeway Road in Raheny.
The height of the increase is between 20cm and 80cm at various points along the stretch.
Some parts of the stretch can be susceptible to flooding, while others are not, and Regan says the parts with the largest height increase do not have historical flood problems.
Local resident Conor Morrissey has been working alongside Regan as part of the campaign to stop the building of the wall and put together a video showing how views will be impacted by the increase in the wall’s height.
In the video, he says that from talking to people in the locality they felt completely unaware of what exactly was going on:
The view from here on James Larkin Road across the lagoon at Dollymount, the Wooden Bridge, to the city and the hills beyond is one of the most beautiful and iconic in the city. It’s now under threat because of a seawall which has sprung up at roughly the same speed as the Berlin Wall, from the causeway right up the coast road.
Regan this week began collecting signatures as part of the campaign, both by meeting people every day down at the Causeway and putting a sample petition on her Facebook page for people to download.
She says she wants to lobby the ministers involved so that the council will stop the work and review the height of the walls. At this point, she says that they are not considering legal action against the wall’s construction.
“I think that they should review the height levels. They really need to look at what they are doing. I think that it’s very easy to make a mistake when there’s a number of departments involved. You need to ask yourself, have you really stood back and looked at what you have?”
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