Grow College Green
The proposed redevelopment of College Green is open for public consultation from now until 12 March 2026. I encourage everyone to think about what they want out of the city centre and to make a submission by clicking the button below.
Have your say - send in your feedback!
I'm excited by this development. Passing through Front Arch every day as a student brought home the contrast between the noisy, polluted, vehicle-dominated College Green and quiet, leafy, human-scale Front Square. Opening up College Green to make it an inviting place for Dubliners to gather together is long overdue.
Having said that, creating a new high-quality public space here is not without its difficulties, so I will be making some observations to the project team along the following themes
- accessiblity by public transport, especially from the Northside of the city
- seating and places to rest
- toilets!
- suitability for all ages - how does this space work if you are 3 / 30 / 60 / 80 years old?
- will the space be open to Dubliners all the time? Or will there be ticketed events for tourists that exclude local people?
- how will we manage interaction / potential conflict between people on foot and cyclists?
- How will this space work in the winter? What can be done to make sure we don't end up this space being dark and windswept when the weather doesn't cooperate?
One final thing I'd like to bring up is decarbonisation. The proposal talks about reducing operational and embodied carbon during construction and operation. However there is a lack of consistency here - one department within Dublin City Council is telling us they are making efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, while at exactly the same time the CEO of DCC is telling us they want to move the council's headquarters to Camden Yard and demolish the existing HQ building at Wood Quay, which contains hundreds of thousands of tonnes of embodied carbon. If we are serious about limiting our CO2 emissions we should be looking at retrofitting our existing buildings to get the maximum value out of the carbon embodied in their construction. I don't think the public will be fooled by a splashy public realm project that greenwashes environmentally destructive practises by our public bodies.
