This has created a 'That won't work' attitude within Ireland. If designed properly Ballymun could have lead the way for us Irish to plan for the future of Dublin and not cause us to be used as a 'Worst-case scenario' instead we went on to build areas like Tallaght, Blanchardstown, Lucan and Clondalkin these areas of West Dublin are masses of housing estates spreading out into the countryside.
When first built most had little or no transport links to Dublin's City centre causing our urban sprawl to spiral out of control with the building of large retail parks and shopping centres and also causing cases like Tallaght once a small village in the Dublin countryside with a population of about 2,000 in the early 1970s, to now have a population of nearly 103,000 larger than that of Galway and Limerick Cities. Causing it to be the largest area of Population after the Dublin and Cork Cities. There is even now calls for Tallaght to be given City status now that really puts our urban sprawl problem into perspective.
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| Tallaght Town Centre is beginning to look less like a suburb and more like a city. |
The figures of the population growth in Tallaght are an eye opener, the whole east coast of Ireland is slowly becoming 'Dublin'. I referred to it in my blog as a concrete tsunami, to put it lightly. Its a shame ballymun ended up as it did, mainly due to terrible spacial planning and broken promises, timing with the recession in the 80's and the influx of heroin, and with high unemployment and lack of infrastructure in ballymun it was inevitable it would fail.
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