NAAS, 25 July: by Brian Byrne. A Naas UDC councillor declared last night that council members ‘should not be nitpicking about the letter of the law’ in terms of planning permission conditions. Pat O’Reilly (right) was responding to a motion by Pat McCarthy which asked that planning conditions be enforced, in particular those relating to the new development by Baba Exports Ltd on the Sallins Road. Baba is controlled by Newbridge-based developer Tom Treacy.
The McCarthy motion was rooted in a running controversy about the developer’s claim that he couldn’t fulfil a key condition of providing an alternative car park on the site to the now-closed Sallins Road car park, which was recently sold to him by the UDC for £500,000. Mr Treacy was to build a link road on the site first and use that as a temporary car park while a planned multi-storey facility was constructed.
That condition was subsequently reinforced in a determination of an appeal to An Bord Pleanala, but Mr Treacy later told the council that ‘health and safety’ considerations made it impossible for him to fulfil the alternative car park condition.
In the meantime, Naas UDC spent £2.5 million to acquire Hederman’s Yard and Tutty’s shoe factory on Friary Road. The yard has been resurfaced and marked as a public car park (above), and Mr Treacy has contributed £50,000 towards the estimated £660,000 cost of this work in lieu of not providing his own car park.
Pat McCarthy said last night that he didn’t think the council had a legal right to waive that planning condition, and he wondered what would happen if the decision was challenged in court?
Mary Glennon said the planning permission was a ‘legal document’ and she found it ‘absolutely incredible’ that a builder could go ahead without any enforcement taking place. “They should be made undo what they have done if they do not comply with conditions,” she said.
Anthony Egan said every councillor around the table ‘should support all planning conditions’ and not ‘pick and choose’ which they would enforce.
Pat O’Reilly said he believed the people who had placed that particular condition on the developer ‘were wrong’ and then made his comment about ‘nitpicking’. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” he said, and suggested that councillors who ‘were against the development of the town’ should leave the council.
Seamie Moore (right) said that ‘what Baba Exports have got, they’ve got, and we can’t go back and take anything from them’, and he suggested it would be unsafe anyway to have a temporary car park where ‘lorryloads of concrete would be moving around’.
Pat McCarthy in reply said that ‘it was no excuse’ to let a developer off a planning condition just because a car park for which ‘the people of Naas had paid top dollar’ had been provided by the UDC. “The council’s professional planners inserted the conditions,” he said. “What credibility do we have when we allow a developer operate like this and at the same time make people building back kitchens comply fully with permissions?”
A visibly angry town manager said he couldn’t understand why Baba Exports had been named in the motion. “You’ve been looking for car parks here since I arrived a year and a half ago,” Tommy Skehan said. “The developer is prepared to build a car park for 700 cars, and he has agreed to contribute to the Hederman’s Yard costs, and he has given an assurance that car park spaces will be available on his development before Christmas.”
The motion was defeated by five votes to three, with one abstention.
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In the original planning permission granted by Naas UDC on 29 May 2000, condition 47 said the applicant 'is to provide an alternative temporary car park on the land required for the link road while the new multi-storey car park is being constructed. Details of the temporary car park are to be agreed with the Planning Authority before development commences. This car park is to be provided before the existing car park is closed. Condition 4 imposed in the subsequent An Bord Pleanala decision on 26 January 2001 reinforced condition 47, even though this had not been appealed: (i) The proposed road linking the Dublin Road and Sallins Road shall be constructed and finished to a surface standard acceptable to the Planning Authority prior to the closure of the public car park on the Sallins Road. |
©2001brianbyrne/knn