Ballymun

A former Ballymun Tower

Among the opprobrium heaped on Ballymun, the deployment of the flats has been described by the environmental journalist Frank McDonald, in his book The Construction of Dublin, as the Irish state's 'worst planning disaster'. However, at the time of its construction, Ballymun was a sought-after location and prospective tenants had to pass an interview to get housing there. There were three types of apartment building: seven fifteen-storey towers, nineteen eight-storey blocks and ten four-storey blocks. The flats were built in the 1960s under the authority of Neil Blaney, the then Fianna Fáil Minister for Local Government.

According to geographer Joe Brady of University College Dublin, Dublin Corporation were sceptical about the Ballymun scheme:

They were made an offer by... Blaney which they couldn't refuse. He offered to build them 2,500 housing units at a time when their own housing development programme had to be ramped up and when you had the additional misfortune of the collapse of the tenement blocks in Fenian Street which meant that Dublin Corporation was bounced into dealing with all of its condemned houses at once... They would have taken anything from anybody at that point.[5]

The first tenants moved in between August 1966 and December 1966. By February 1969, when the National Building Agency's contract for Ballymun ceased and control of Ballymun was handed to Dublin Corporation, there was a total of 3,021 dwellings, fully comprising publicly-owned social housing.

New Ballymun under construction

The government and Dublin City Council agreed an ambitious regeneration plan for Ballymun, with a budget exceeding 400 million euro. The creation of Ballymun Regeneration Limited as a limited company controlled by Dublin City Council initiated the main part of the project, beginning of the demolition of the Ballymun flats, and planned to conclude with the emergence of a "new town" of Ballymun. As of 2008, six of the seven towers (Pearse, Ceannt, Macdermott McDonagh, Connolly, and Clarke) as well as three eight-storey blocks and seven four-storey blocks had been demolished by DSM, with the residents generally rehoused in new "state of the art" housing in Ballymun. The new housing is a mixture of public, private, voluntary and co-operative housing. The residential aspects of the "new Ballymun" were largely completed by 2013.

A film of the leisure centre by filmmakers Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy, LEISURE CENTRE, was made in 2007 and starred hundreds of Ballymun residents.[6] A documentary film entitled Ballymun Lullaby was released in February 2011 and includes scenes detailing the regeneration of Ballymun as well as its impact on the culture of its populace.[7]

The regeneration project, despite well-publicised questions about accountability and democratic participation, also delivered many other amenities, including reworked park areas, a major City Council office facility, Health Service facilities, a public leisure centre, the aXis arts centre, student accommodation, a new hotel, and some renewed retail facilities. However, for a variety of reasons, the regeneration saw the departure of many shops, most notably the virtual emptying of Ballymun Shopping Centre, with the result that, as happened when Ballymun was first built up, the more than 17,000 residents have to travel to other districts for major grocery, and virtually all non-grocery, shopping.[2]

In 2007, a floor of the by-then vacant Thomas Clarke Tower was temporarily transformed into a hotel as part of an art project; the project ran for a month and was heavily booked, with a waiting list.[8]

As part of the New Ballymun, a major tree-planting project called amaptocare has been run, with more than 600 people sponsoring the planting of around 635 trees, and providing inscription texts which are engraved on plaques near the trees. Sponsors were informed that the all trees would be identified on a glass panel at Ballymun's central plaza; the plaza was completed by 2013, but the panel has, as of 2019, not yet been made.

A multistorey hotel fire occurred in the building containing the Metro Hotel Dublin and two floors of apartments, on 21 March 2018. The fire broke out at approximately 8.00 pm and affected the top seven floors of the building. At least 12 units of Dublin Fire Brigade attended the building, and confirmed that the hotel was successfully evacuated.[9] Dublin Fire Brigade reported soon after the fire was extinguished that there were no reports of any casualties or people unaccounted for.[10] This included approximately 150 guests who were staying in the hotel.[11] The fire broke out in a private residence on the 13th floor above rooms for hotel guests.

The 15 storey hotel- and apartment-building was built as part of the Ballymun renewal, developed in 2006 by Pierce Contracting and a group of investors who included businessman Paddy Kelly.[12] The hotel was built as part of the Ballymun Renewal Scheme. The hotel was designed by Shay Cleary Architects for Pierse Contracting and was originally operated by the Days Inn Hotel group. It was scheduled to open on 9 June 2006.[13] In 2007 a charter plane with 118 passengers and crew narrowly avoided crashing into the hotel ater its pilot mistook the lights of the 16 storey building for the runway at Dublin Airport. The red lighting on the hotel's roof combined with its white internal light was mistaken for the approach lights of the airport's runway. The incident occurred at 11.34 pm on the night of 16 August 2007, when the McDonnell Douglas jet was carrying 112 passengers and six crew on a charter flight from Lisbon to Dublin.[14] In April 2014, the 88 bedroom Metro Hotel was put on the market in the region of €2.5 million. Along with the hotel, the sellers sought €3 million for 30 two-bed apartments on the upper floors of the property. In July 2016, planning permission was refused for the retention of masts and antenna on the hotel.[15]

The 1992 film Into the West was set and filmed in Ballymun.

Other fictional works that were set in the area were the 1994 drama mini-series Family and the 1982 short film One Day Time . Several documentaries of the area have been made throughout the years, most of which were during the demolition of the last block of flats.

Bloody Sunday, a 2002 British-Irish film written and directed by Paul Greengrass and based around the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" incident in Northern Ireland. The film was mostly shot in Ballymun, with some location scenes shot in Northern Ireland.

In September 2006, Gill & Macmillan published The Mun, by Lynn Connolly. This is a memoir covering the history of Ballymun from its inception to the final regeneration of the town. The Mun was Lynn's account of another side of Ballymun, of which she has fond memories. She wrote of a side of Ballymun not written of in the press stories about drug dealing and gangsters; a community that thrived in spite of the squalor. The Mun was Lynn's way of putting the story straight for the decent people of Ballymun.

In April 2009, Irish publisher Gill & Macmillan published Ballymun resident Rachael Keogh's account of her life as a heroin addict, Dying to Survive. Rachael started taking drugs aged 12 and for the next 15 years was hooked on a variety of substances. In 2006, after repeated attempts to get help, Rachael went to the media to publicise her plight.

In 2010 New Island Books published 'The Ballymun Trilogy' by the Dublin playwright, Dermot Bolger: three plays that chart forty years of life in Ballymun and which were all premiered in Axis in Ballymun before being staged in Britain, America, Poland and elsewhere.