Rundale

By Kathleen Stokes and Philip Lawton

We’ve heard it often: proclamations around how wonderful it would be if Dublin’s port could be transformed into a new waterfront city centre neighbourhood. Pundits claim that Dublin Port is “ a waste of space” that needs to be moved and speak poetically about the possibility of a new central, waterfront district, replete with high-density housing, amenities, and spaces for leisure.

Few would argue against housing and resident-centred community development in principle, yet this proposed closure of Dublin Port for mixed-use redevelopment has been criticised for making “no sense” – including by Dublin Port Company representatives who’ve wryly noted that “some people struggle to differentiate between a notion and a vision” and that “one of the main differences is a lot of hard work.”

In this article, we focus on the relationship between the port and the city of Dublin at the metropolitan scale. We argue that the desire to move Dublin Port highlights the tensions between, on the one hand, the processes of urbanisation, and, on the other, the media-frenzied world of ‘hot take’ urbanism. Within the desire to move Dublin Port there emerges some fundamental tensions between these two ways of conceiving cities.

Cities and Ports

Throughout its urban history, Dublin’s development has been closely entwined with its port, as an important way of importing resources and materials into the city and beyond, and, of course as a point of export and exchange. This has significant implications for the ways in which the city has been shaped for centuries. Certainly, this relationship has changed over time, but it remains important in terms of the logistics, transport and associated labour pools.

The need for labour intensive and warehouse-based port districts has declined in many cities over the last half century, in part as a result of the automation and containerisation of global shipping. Over time, ships have gotten bigger, and ports have moved to deeper water nearby. As former port areas have lost their initial use, they have been subjected to substantial redevelopment plans in cities around the world, from Liverpool to Hong Kong. It is here that the relationship between port redevelopment and the political-economic role of urbanism comes to the fore.

Port Relocation Fantasies

The desire to move Dublin Port revolves around reclaiming the port space for a new shiny city of mixed-use urbanism. Constant refrain is made to cities elsewhere, and particularly cities in continental European. As we have argued here, the ways in which the ‘new city on the waterfront’ is envisaged is illustrative of how context can often be quickly removed within urbanist discourse. Cities such as Copenhagen, Oslo or Helsinki have not so much ‘moved’ their port, as developed new facilities further downstream, within close proximity to the former port.

From a planning perspective, it can be posited that the reason Dublin Port has not moved to any nearby location is that of geography: there are few deep-water options. Yet, in a highly mediated world, where cities such as Copenhagen are placed on a pedestal by speculative urbanist commentators, the quick response is that of a desire for emulation at all costs – and regardless of geographic conditions. Yet, the removal of detailed context in such debates plays a powerful role. The quick reference within newspaper columns renders history and power invisible.

Previous dockland redevelopments have been critiqued for producing privatised spaces of conspicuous consumption, far removed from the daily needs of most urban inhabitants. Indeed, Dublin’s Docklands have already been transformed by these processes, becoming central locations in the city’s global tech-led transformation. All of this is quickly forgotten in the desire to move the port, with the assumption the new space will be somehow neutralized from powerful interests. Yet, the globalized transformation of port spaces revolves around such image-making strategies. The repetition of simple narratives of space plays a crucial role in making such change seem necessary if not inevitable.

Fundamentally, the desire to move Dublin Port emphasizes different understandings of Dublin Port. Contrasting the port as a longstanding productive base within the city (and, consequently, a source of livelihoods and anchor for local communities), the site is now also seen for its speculative development potential. This reinvention of the port in turn calls into question the very essence of the city as a lived space. While the redevelopment of urban space is not necessarily a bad thing, we must ask who such transformations are for, who benefits, and who will be impacted by them? How are differences weighed up and who has a say in whether these massive projects go ahead? A transformative action in one location has significant implications at various scales in a city. The desire to move a port from its current location will have extreme stakes for the city and beyond.

New port prospects

What is important to highlight here, is that calls to redevelop Dublin Port as a new neighbourhood are not responding to a decline in use or function. Dublin Port Company has announced it will reach capacity by 2030-40 and is currently implementing upgrades to extend its function until 2040. Recognising this limitation, the Dublin Port Company has invited discussion around how additional capacity could be distributed across various nearby existing ports, including a series of dialogue papers to consider relocation and alternatives. 

While the ideal of moving Dublin Port seems to offer binary perspectives on the movement of one piece of infrastructure, the reality is complicated by the interplay of a fragmented set of actors including development companies, investors, and commercial state companies. Arguably, the most visible proposal for relocation has centred around calls for a new deep-water port at Bremore Head between Balbriggan in North County Dublin and the Meath coastline, south of Drogheda. While previous iterations of the Bremore proposal have been in discussion since at least 2007, the current proposal has been jointly led by Ronan Property Group and Drogheda Port Company. They plan to submit a detailed planning application for the new port by 2026/27 following ongoing consultation (although we have struggled to find public information on what this consultation entails).

Infrastructural ownership has long been cast as a secure investment by global actors like the World Bank and BlackRock. Through these perspectives, we can see a new port development is entangled with, and appeals on, the presumption it will be a financially profitable investment. Along with promises of local jobs and economic development, the Bremore plans have also become associated into the wider policy discussions around the Dublin-Belfast Economic Corridor. The Ronan Group has also been described in the Irish Times as having a “a dual interest in Dublin Port being moved”, with their submission to Dublin City Council’s draft development plan suggesting that relocating port functions to Bremore would “free up very well-served lands for homes, communities, recreation and employment” and “facilitate greater height and density to be achieved.”

There is little doubt that a deep-water port would be an immense transformation to this quiet stretch of beach near the Devlin River estuary. Already, the North County Dublin and Meath Coast has seen significant transformation in the name of extended urbanisation and economic development in recent decades, from the completion of the M1 motorway in the early 2000s to expansive suburban housing development in the area.

Impacts and elsewheres

The prospect of a newly developed Bremore Port raises possibilities of a further – and indeed significant – level of landscape change in the coming decades. In as much as no port can be seen as a stand-alone entity, this development can only be seen as the intensification of a much longer-term process of urbanisation, with attendant physical, ecological, and social changes.

As such, the Bremore proposal has not been without contestation. Residents from surrounding areas and archaeologists campaigned to Save Bremore against the proposed port development in 2009. Their concerns largely related to how the proposed port would impact on the environment, archaeology, and heritage. The campaign also questioned whether a major centralised port in Ireland was needed, and what such a develop would mean for existing port communities and associated livelihoods.

While the picture of a transformed Dublin Port into a new ‘mixed-use’ type of urban centre is pictured through the ideals of sustainability, the reality is hugely different. Moving the port is not a simple act of moving a piece of cake to one side of a plate, but involves a significant shift in the fundamentals of the wider urban region. Enacting a seemingly enlightened urbanist utopia in one area has significant implications for other locations. With this in mind, we wish to ask who is driving such substantial transformations to the urban periphery, and what interests do the proposed transformations serve?

Without carefully attending to these questions, the proposed development of Bremore Port risks becoming an example of infrastructural displacement, or worse, a symptom of disregard for the impact of ongoing extended urban development beyond the city centre. As such, ongoing debates around port relocation are fundamental to Dublin’s wider urban development politics and future, and to that of Ireland’s development more generally.

Planning at the Metropolitan Scale?

Discussions of the location of industrial functions in cities raise some significant challenges. On the one hand, Dublin Port has been a crucial infrastructure and job provider in the city centre for a prolonged period. This has not been without challenges, be they environmental, noise-related, or socio-economic. However, a port’s location in proximity to various suppliers, storage facilities, and other associated industries raises an important element to the bedding in of such facilities. Existing port infrastructure have been bedded over hundreds of years. Any new port location would likely need be accompanied by major landscape transformations nearby to accommodate associated facilities and industries.

Any movement of a port would need to be justified on the basis of ensuring such a shift would be sustainable. In the case of Dublin, arguments have often been made to try and emulate other locations. Yet, Helsinki’s relocation was only a shift of 15 km while Oslo port simply moved across the harbour. Moving Dublin Port to the proposed Bremore site would mean moving the over 30 km away, and not to an existing infrastructural or port site – such as a disused shipyard or Navy Base. To put this more bluntly, and to the best of our knowledge, Dublin would be the first European port to be moved to a beach.

Narrating our Collective Urban Future

Fundamentally, debates about moving Dublin Port are a distraction from wider discussions on the future of planning in Ireland. Much media debate gets tied up in knots on the supposed issues of the Irish planning system and is dominated by discussion of supposed NIMBYs (‘not in my backyard’-ers) who block planning. The NIMBY debate is best left for another day but, suffice to say, it misses out on the complexity of urban infrastructural planning and development politics.

Current discussions around moving Dublin Port need to look at (and publicly debate) the ways in which the country is planned from a macro perspective. The recognition of Dublin Port’s dwindling capacity and that efforts to prepare planning proposals for Bremore are underway make this a crucial moment to think carefully about how infrastructural and urban futures are envisaged and implemented. Engaging with and teasing out the potential and limitations of the Metropolitan Area Strategic Planning (MASP) would be a start here, yet it receives sparse media attention.

Ongoing calls to ‘move the port’ are predicated upon a notion that Ireland ‘can’t plan’ and present themselves as a common-sense reaction without alternative. Yet, in reality, they serve to illustrate a lack of understanding of the basics of long-term and integrated planning in Ireland or a willingness to engage in the topic beyond utopian dead-ends.