Infrastructure that never happened

That was a stunt by Irish Rail to block the Luas to Broombridge

Foxdene Stadium in Clondalkin, proposed by Owen O’Callaghan, was meant to have a capacity of 40,000 and be the Dublin home of Wimbledon FC back in 1997. This predates the Eircom Park and Bertie Bowl.

Obviously was never built, and almost 30 years on the site is still undeveloped fields.

Is that where all the burnt out cars do be? Sort of a "welcome to Dublin culchie, turn around asap" sign

You can’t just move a football club to another country at the drop of a hat.

There was naturally enough huge opposition to the plan.

What was the Jacob’s masterplan mentioned by @L1011? The place only closed in 08 I think.

I can’t find any documents on this, I looked through the SDCC development plans in the relevant period and found nothing relating to the site itself, although there were some proposals for the surrounding Airton/Belgard estate.

So just to confirm the land reservation would’ve been where exactly? The yellow line? Looks like they would’ve had to do a fair bit of demolition to have a straight road.

The 1973 Dublin Transport Study proposal came up with two main options for the Greater Dublin highway network as envisaged by 1991. The ‘b’ plan was similar to what we eventually got, with ‘a’ being quite a strange proposal which did away with the C-ring that would become the M50:

There’s more detail about these, plus some map reconstructions of the Grand Canal Motorway from the 1971 plan (see page 2) on this site: https://randall.ie/unfinished-dublin - the 1973 plan looks like a refinement of the 1971 version.

The historical context of this report is worth noting. This study was published in 1973, just at the moment when Europe was turning against urban motorways. The Dublin plan has three concentric highway routes: the outer motorway, the canals, and a central box with corners at Smithfield, Connolly, Stephen’s Green and the Liberties (a descendant of the infamous “Tangent” from the 1960s). This pattern is clearly influenced by the London Ringways plan ( London Ringways - Wikipedia ) which had an inner urban box surrounded by orbitals.

The problem with the Ringways was that central box: it required construction of elevated highways that overshadowed the residential streets and made the city a horrible place for people to actually live. Once those elevated roads started going up, the public revolted, with mass campaigns against the plan. The Labour party gained control of the Greater London Council in 1973 by campaigning on a single issue: stop the construction of the London Ringways, a promise they followed up on.

The experience of London killed any plan for a motorway inside Dublin city, even if we’d had the funds.