BPS Planning
A return to Santry brings back an old friendship, a geographer’s account of Ballymun and a question Dublin has never quite answered: how can places so close together be held so far apart?
Shoulder surgery is an elaborate way of revisiting an old neighbourhood. I had mine at the Sports Surgery Clinic in Santry on Friday, 6 November, and wrote this in the recovery ward. It brought me back to a part of Dublin threaded through my own history. I once ran for Clonliffe. I lived locally while lecturing at what was then DIT. Santry also brought back memories of an old friend who found considerable entertainment in the way I spoke.
Sinéad Power and I were best friends at Trinity College. She was hilarious, with a dark humour that found plenty of material in a “marbly mouth” like me. Dublin’s internal borders could be crossed, but apparently not without a running commentary.
Sinéad had one sister and two brothers, and all three went to college. In my recollection, it was only a wall from her Santry to Ballymun. Santry, as I remember it, was flying, while the vast social housing scheme next door was attracting criticism on a national scale. How could places so close together acquire such different reputations and prospects?
There was something more substantial than the accent to remember. I was very proud when Sinéad’s master’s work became her Irish Geography article on Ballymun. I had helped by reading and commenting before publication, and my references here draw on my own pre-publication copy. Returning to the area brought that work back to mind, along with the extraordinary changes around it.
The towers have gone. Ballymun has new homes, streets and public facilities. Santry Demesne has become part of a different residential landscape, with a public park at its heart. IKEA draws people to an area whose name once seemed sufficient, in some Dublin conversations, to end the conversation. The city centre can now seem remarkably close, even without a metro service.
That last observation is partly about perception. Dublin has not physically moved towards Ballymun. What has changed is the city against which we judge it, and perhaps some of the assumptions we bring to an address.
It is striking to think how a place could acquire so damaging a reputation beside established residential districts and within the same north-Dublin landscape as the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin. Santry and Ballymun are distinct places, but their proximity makes the contrast more revealing, not less. If broad location was shared, what did housing policy, tenure, management, public investment and reputation do differently on either side? The wall cannot be an explanation. It marks the point at which an explanation is needed.
The scheme before the verdict
Sinéad’s The development of the Ballymun housing scheme, Dublin 1965–1969 (https://doi.org/10.1080/00750770009478591), published in 2000, begins with the making of the estate rather than the reputation it subsequently acquired. It records the contract signed in February 1965 and the construction, over its four-year term, of 3,021 dwellings, some reaching fifteen storeys, using industrialised building methods.
More importantly, her subject was the institutional arrangement behind those buildings: the shifting balance between central and local government, the Department of Local Government’s direct involvement in Dublin housing provision and the contract through which the scheme was delivered.
That is an important starting point. Once a neighbourhood has been declared a failure, its history can begin to sound inevitable. The towers become the explanation for everything that followed. The decisions, responsibilities and assumptions that produced them fade into the background.
Power’s account directs attention back towards those decisions. Ballymun was made through government, finance, contracting and planning, not deposited on Dublin by a theory of architecture acting alone. Those are better starting points for understanding the contrast with Santry than the suggestion that Ballymun was simply too far out. How was housing allocated and managed? What provision was made for maintenance, services and access to employment? How did investment keep pace with the needs of a very large estate? These are questions about institutions and policy, not the supposed deficiencies of the people who made their homes there.
None of this requires denying serious problems. Nor should affection for the old estate oblige anyone to pretend that its physical conditions were satisfactory. A resident could want a better home and love the people around the existing one. Those positions are not contradictory. Much of the careless language about regeneration depends on making them seem so.
The description of Ballymun as a disaster is especially troublesome when it slides from a judgment on public policy into a judgment on those who lived there. A housing scheme can fail its residents. The residents are not thereby a failed population.
The distance carried by an address
The research on stigma helps explain why nearby affluence and attractive surroundings did not prevent Ballymun becoming, in the eyes of outsiders, a place apart.
In Changing Perceptions: Stigma and Social Housing in Ireland (https://app.mediahq.com/app/release-file/3405), Anna Carnegie, Michael Byrne and Michelle Norris examined Ballymun alongside Fatima Mansions and Clarion Quay. Their 2017 research summary describes stigma as something produced through housing policy, social inequality, public representations and everyday encounters. It also makes clear that social housing is not universally stigmatised and that many residents have a strong pride in their neighbourhoods.
Their analysis draws attention to the residualisation of social housing: the growing concentration of low-income and disadvantaged households in a tenure increasingly treated as a last resort. That is not a description of people’s worth. It is an account of how housing policy can concentrate disadvantage, then invite the public to mistake its consequences for the character of an address.
A bad address is not simply a description of a place with problems. It can become a judgment applied in advance to a person. Once that happens, the name does work that no fair assessment of the individual could justify.
The researchers found that residents could experience both external stigma and distinctions within neighbourhoods. Some interviewees concealed their address or housing tenure. Design changes could improve reputation, but a negative image, once established, was difficult to shift. A new façade did not automatically produce a new public understanding.
Dublin’s ear for an accent can be wonderfully funny. It can also be an efficient little instrument of classification. Sinéad’s teasing was affectionate; the larger social habit is not always so benign. We can place people remarkably quickly, then congratulate ourselves on knowing them.
Roddy Doyle’s comedy is useful here because it frustrates that shortcut. In The Snapper (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/roddy-doyle/the-snapper/), Jimmy Rabbitte Senior takes his daughter’s pregnancy seriously enough to start educating himself from library books, then shares his newly acquired knowledge with his pub companions. The prospective grandfather becomes an enthusiast for information his daughter could probably have managed without hearing quite so often.
The humour comes from this particular father’s mixture of anxiety, affection and excessive helpfulness, not from the proposition that his neighbourhood is an amusing social problem. Doyle lets people exceed the labels attached to them. His Barrytown is fictional, not another name for Ballymun, and a novel is not evidence about an estate. But the refusal to reduce a person to an address is a lesson worth bringing from literature into public discussion.
What changed on the ground
Nearly thirty years after regeneration began, the transformation is substantial and deserves to be acknowledged without embarrassment.
Dublin City Council’s development-plan account of Ballymun (https://www.dublincity.ie/dublin-city-development-plan-2022-2028/written-statement/chapter-13-strategic-development-regeneration-areas/134-sdra-2-ballymun) dates the regeneration process from 1997 and the masterplan from 1998. It records replacement homes for residents of the flat blocks, private housing, a new Main Street, improved connections, community facilities, an arts centre and parks. These are meaningful changes to the circumstances of daily life, not merely improvements to a photograph.
The demolition of Joseph Plunkett Tower began in September 2015 (https://www.rte.ie/archives/2025/0818/1528995-joseph-plunkett-demolition/). It was the last of the seven towers. The contemporary RTÉ report captured mixed feelings: the end of an unsatisfactory housing form could also be the disappearance of somewhere people had spent decades of their lives.
This is one reason the familiar before-and-after image is inadequate. It shows the buildings removed and the buildings added. It cannot show which friendships survived the transition, which familiar meeting places disappeared or how long people lived beside an unfinished promise.
Keith Kintrea and Jenny Muir made a related distinction in their 2009 assessment of the regeneration (https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.80.1.5). They examined integration through markets, citizenship and reciprocity, finding substantial physical progress but uneven and sometimes flawed economic and social integration. That was an assessment during the programme, not a final verdict on Ballymun today. Its value is the question it leaves us: integration into what, and on whose terms?
Nearby Santry followed a different development history. A March 2000 report on the Santry Woods scheme (https://www.rte.ie/news/2000/0323/6196-rianta/) described apartments, a hotel, offices and public park provision, after an appeal against permission. Fingal County Council took Santry Demesne into its care in June 2003 (https://www.fingal.ie/directory/amenities/parks/santry-demesne-regional-park). Its park preserves traces of the former estate while providing paths, a playground and public green space.
These changes belong in the story of the wider area, but private development in Santry and public regeneration in Ballymun were not one scheme with one set of beneficiaries. Their different development histories are part of the explanation we need to investigate, not a reason to abandon the comparison. The relationship between them depends on connections, access and the use people can make of the facilities around them. Being next door creates possibilities; it does not distribute them equally.
IKEA opened in Ballymun in July 2009 (https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2009/0727/120025-ikea-business/). Its arrival matters to the area’s economic geography and to how outsiders encounter the name. But a successful regional shopping destination is not an audit of the wellbeing of every household nearby. Employment, local spending and access to opportunity need their own examination.
Doyle supplies a useful comic antidote to grand language about enterprise. In The Van (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/323337/the-van-by-roddy-doyle/), Jimmy and Bimbo respond to unemployment by buying a decrepit fish-and-chip van. In the buoyancy of Italia ’90, it looks like a route towards an income. The business produces rather more complications than the simple combination of hungry customers and fried food would suggest.
The joke is not that people should lack ambition. It is that making a living involves money, working relationships, practical competence and the possibility of things going wrong. Those matters do not become less important when an economic strategy acquires a glossy cover.
Who gets to feel at home?
The most persuasive reason not to declare Ballymun either rescued or ruined is that residents’ experiences cannot be fitted honestly into either account.
Sander van Lanen’s research with young adults in Ballymun (https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1774), published in 2020, drew on interviews conducted in 2015. It examined exclusion from employment, independent housing and support services during austerity. Participants could remain strongly rooted in their neighbourhood while losing opportunities to participate in its life.
His important distinction was between being physically moved and feeling displaced. A person need not leave an area to find that services, possibilities and familiar ways of belonging have been withdrawn. This was a small qualitative study of a particular period, not a census of present-day Ballymun. It nevertheless demonstrates why a regeneration assessment cannot end at the front door of a replacement house.
A more recent study by Alina Bezlaj (https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/IzpisGradiva.php?id=166070&lang=eng), published in 2025 from fieldwork undertaken in 2022, brings the question closer to the present. Through observation and interviews, she explored different forms of attachment among long-term residents and newcomers.
For some established residents, the old Ballymun remained intensely present through memories and shared stories. The former shopping centre was especially significant as a place of ordinary encounters. Its importance was not exhausted by the quality of the building or the range of goods sold inside it. It had helped people find one another.
Newcomers could value the location and the possibility of making a home there, while approaching belonging differently. Some also described difficulties gaining acceptance, including experiences of hostility linked to their migrant backgrounds. The newcomer material was limited to four participants’ accounts, a constraint the author explicitly acknowledges. It should not become a general accusation against a community. It does warn against imagining that an established sense of belonging necessarily includes everyone who arrives.
There is something here for both the enthusiast and the sceptic about social mix. A range of tenures can broaden housing opportunities and weaken the equation between an address and a single social category. It cannot, by itself, guarantee respectful relationships. Carnegie and her colleagues’ research also found that efforts to reduce external stigma could coexist with internal distinctions between residents.
The question is not whether people now want to live in the area. Some newcomers plainly choose it, and my own impression is that its position within Dublin is being appreciated differently. The research also reminds us that many people valued living there long before the rest of the city became interested.
We should be pleased when a place attracts new residents. We should not tell those already at home that their neighbourhood only became worthwhile when someone else discovered it.
Closer, but not finished
Ballymun’s future is still being made. On 6 November 2026, the Land Development Agency announced a planning application for 564 apartments (https://lda.ie/news/lda-submits-plans-for-564-new-homes-in-ballymun), with childcare, community, arts and cultural spaces, open space and play provision. The proposed buildings range from six to twelve storeys. This is an application, not permission and not completed housing.
The juxtaposition with the old towers invites a glib conclusion about repeating the past. It should invite a better question instead. Height is one consideration in housing, not a complete housing policy. Design quality, management, tenure, amenities, services and the experience of residents must be examined together. Neither condemning height by association nor approving it in the name of compact growth is an adequate assessment of a particular proposal.
The same care is needed with transport. MetroLink is not yet a service that residents can use. Government approved its progression to detailed tender stage in September 2026 (https://www.metrolink.ie/en/news/latest-news/government-approves-metrolink-to-proceed-to-detailed-tender-stage/). The project includes Ballymun, but procurement milestones and future connectivity should not be confused with present accessibility.
A place can be close to the centre on a map and less close in the time, cost or difficulty of an actual journey. Walking routes, bus services, safe crossings and connections to everyday destinations matter before a metro opens, as they will afterwards. The National Botanic Gardens are free to enter (https://www.botanicgardens.ie/glasnevin/). That is a valuable public gift; it does not remove the need to make the wider city genuinely accessible.
For planners and geographers, the task is to connect these different accounts of place. Plans should be tested against ordinary journeys and the needs of established and future residents. New public spaces should support informal encounters as well as satisfy a drawing. Housing quality needs maintenance and management beyond the completion certificate. Evaluation should follow opportunities and experiences over time, not simply record construction outputs or changes in property values.
The council’s 2026 social-regeneration funding programme (https://www.dublincity.ie/people-and-communities/community-improvement-initiatives/find-community-grants-and-funding/ballymun-social-regeneration-fund-2026) recognises continuing work across education, health, family support, safety, culture, sport and placemaking. The existence of that work is not proof of failure. It is an acknowledgment that sustaining a neighbourhood is a continuing public responsibility.
My return to Santry began with the body and ended in geography. It brought back memories of running for Clonliffe, of living locally while lecturing at DIT and of Sinéad’s particular gift for puncturing an accent without extinguishing its owner. It also brought back my pride in her taking a place seriously enough to investigate how it had been made.
That remains the right ambition. Ballymun should be neither a cautionary tale stripped of its people nor a success story declared complete because the skyline has changed. The contrast with Santry asks us to explain how housing was provided, managed and sustained, how opportunity was shared and how a reputation became attached to an address. Proximity was never destiny. Only a wall away is not an answer. It is the question.
Sources and reading
Sinéad Power (2000), The development of the Ballymun housing scheme, Dublin 1965–1969 (https://doi.org/10.1080/00750770009478591), Irish Geography, 33(2), 199–212. My references to this article draw on my own pre-publication copy, which I read and commented on at the time.
Anna Carnegie, Michael Byrne and Michelle Norris (2017), Changing Perceptions: Stigma and Social Housing in Ireland, executive summary (https://app.mediahq.com/app/release-file/3405). University College Dublin research for Clúid Housing. Related journal article: Norris, Byrne and Carnegie (2019), Combatting stigmatisation of social housing neighbourhoods in Dublin, Ireland (https://doi.org/10.1080/19491247.2018.1532673).
Keith Kintrea and Jenny Muir (2009), Integrating Ballymun? Flawed progress in Ireland’s largest estate regeneration scheme (https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.80.1.5), Town Planning Review, 80(1), 83–108. Abstract consulted.
Sander van Lanen (2020), Exclusion and Sense of Displacement Under Austerity: Experiences from Young Adults in Ballymun, Dublin (https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1774), ACME, 19(1), 352–363. Open full text.
Alina Bezlaj (2025), Affective dynamics of belonging in a regenerated Dublin suburb (https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/IzpisGradiva.php?id=166070&lang=eng), Emotion, Space and Society, 54, 101056. Open full text; first available online in December 2024.
Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper and The Van: the brief paraphrases above are checked against the linked review and publisher’s account. His 2015 interview with Róisín Dwyer (https://www.hotpress.com/culture/roddy-doyle-interview-14182167) also distinguishes fictional dialogue from a transcription of how people actually speak.
This is a literature-based opinion essay, not an original evaluation of regeneration outcomes.
BPS Planning: editorial discussion only, not legal advice.
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