This morning I have been granted leave to take a Judicial Review of An Bord Pleanála’s handling of a proposal to demolish and replace the Deer Park Hotel on Howth Demesne.
Why I’m lodging this JR
The new owners want to knock down Deer Park Hotel and build a new hotel but they did not even consider renovating/reusing the existing building – and I believe they should have.
That’s why I have applied for a Judicial Review of An Bord Pleanála’s handling of the proposal: ABP should have sought a demolition justification report to address the sustainability of knocking down the existing hotel rather than retrofitting and restoring it.
Too much of Dublin’s building stock is destroyed and dumped in favour of new builds. Many people see this for what it is – an enormous waste of resources. Demolition can and should be justified, and ABP should have made sure it was. That’s why I’m lodging this Judicial Review.
The grounds for the application are threefold:
- that the planning application was not accompanied by a demolition justification report addressing the sustainability of demolishing rather than retrofitting the existing hotel,
- that the report from the landowner in response to my appeal to the Board was not circulated to me although that was recommended within the Board, and
- that the handling of screening for environmental impact assessment did not meet EU law requirements.
My concerns are about the sustainability of demolition. I agree with the principle of a hotel at this location, and I don’t consider that the existing hotel is of architectural heritage value. But buildings of poor quality can be turned into high quality buildings with low environmental impact; see the prize-winning examples by Lacaton and Vassal linked from the details below.
Background and details:
Starting in 2005, relying on the advice of a number of experts in the building energy efficiency field, I convinced the members of Fingal County Council to include in a number of Local Area Plans being adopted by the Council an energy performance standard based on the approach used in the 2002 Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EBPD).
The positive reaction of builders to this higher standard, implemented in the planning system in a limited area, was a factor informing the revision of the national Building Standards Part L on a national basis in 2008. Since then and with revisions to the EPBD in 2010, 2018 and 2024, buildings are now required through the building regulations to meet a nearly zero energy standard and will soon be required to meet a zero emissions standard.
The above requirements apply to the operational energy and emissions demand of the buildings. However, construction is also a major factor in global greenhouse gas emissions. Research commissioned by the Irish Green Building Council estimates that 14% of Ireland’s carbon emissions are from the construction of buildings, including the production and transport of materials.
Considerable attention has been drawn in recent years to the need for building practices to change in order to reduce emissions associated with construction including in 2019 the launching of the RetroFirst campaign by the Architects’ Journal, in 2021 the publication of the Built for the Environment report by the Royal Institute of British Architects and Architects Declare, and, also in 2021, the awarding of the Pritzker Architecture Prize to Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal.
As regards demolition and replacement vs. refurbishment and reuse, the Built for the Environment report says in its Executive Summary
The most effective way to avoid embodied carbon emissions is to refurbish, retrofit, and extend the lives of existing buildings, instead of demolishing them and building a new. However, despite embodied carbon being one of the most important sustainability topics for the sector, it is almost entirely unregulated. This needs to change urgently.
Lacaton and Vassal’s 2021 presentation to the Irish Architecture Foundation demonstrates the feasibility of a design approach which meets both social and climate goals by avoiding demolition.
Informed by the discourse around the need to avoid demolition, I, along with my Green colleagues, proposed in the process of drafting the Fingal Development Plan, that the plan, in addition to a number of existing policy statements aimed at discouraging demolition, would explicitly require demolition to be justified on sustainability grounds in line with a circular economy analysis. The Plan as finally adopted contains the following requirement:
Where demolition is proposed, the applicant must submit a demolition justification report to set out the rational for the demolition having regard to the embodied carbon of existing structures as well as the additional use of resources and energy arising from new construction relative to the reuse of existing structures.
Since the coming into force of the 2023 Plan, I have watched planning applications made to Fingal County Council which included demolition proposals, with an eye on the implementation of the above requirement and I have made observations on some.
In relation to the Deer Park Hotel application, I made an observation to Fingal and subsequently an appeal to ABP. (Fingal planning file; ABP planning file.)
Both the observation and the appeal agreed with the principle of a hotel at the location of the existing hotel and noted that the existing hotel was not of any particular architectural value. They focussed on three issues, i.e. the need for proper sustainability assessment of the demolition proposal vs. a renovation/reuse approach, the need to omit the proposed new road (for which permission was also sought and refused in a separate application for reuse of Howth Castle), and the need to maintain pedestrian access to the hotel and estate and to Aideen’s Grave.
When the Board received my appeal it circulated it to the landowner, who responded with an “Embodied Carbon Report.” That report described itself as a proposal as to how such an assessment would be carried out and gave some examples of potential results. An official of the Board recommended that it be circulated to the other parties, which would have included me. However, this didn’t happen; I only learnt of the recommendation on inspecting the file in the Board’s office after they granted permission.
If I had been circulated with the Embodied Carbon Report, I would have critiqued it and pointed out that it doesn’t meet the requirements of the Fingal Development Plan.
The Board’s decision granted permission for the demolition and replacement (while refusing permission for the proposed new road.) In doing so it adopted the Inspector’s evaluation of the Embodied carbon report submitted by the applicant as “reasonable and robust.”
Globally and nationally we are committed to climate neutrality or net zero emissions. To do so we need to ensure that construction is rapidly decarbonised. Reuse and retrofit of existing buildings is an essential part of this.
I’d like to thank Simon Sturgis of www.targetingzero.co.uk for his expert advice and my legal team, Ellen O’Callaghan BL, instructed by Fred Logue of FP Logue Solicitors.