Yahoo Finance Dublin’s famous music pub The Cobblestone saved from developers
Refusal of planning permission for hotel seen as victory against destruction of city’s cultural heritage
Ireland’s most famous traditional music pub has been saved after a Dublin city council planning decision that is being heralded as a landmark victory over property developers.
Plans to turn the three-storey Cobblestone pub and Irish music school in the Smithfield area into a hotel sparked anger in a growing debate about the development of the capital at the cost of cultural heritage.
On Monday, the city council refused planning permission for a hotel at the site after 700 objections were submitted, including one from the minister for heritage, Malcolm Noonan, alongside high-profile protests and street demonstrations by campaigners from Save the Cobblestone and Dublin Is Dying.
Tomás Mulligan, 31, whose family have run the pub for 34 years, said he was delighted with Monday’s decision.
“This is a very emotional day for all of us,” he said. “This was a campaign that was organised by our friends and we are just so grateful that so many people were willing to stand up and protect our culture and the institution.”
The pub is seen as Ireland’s home of “trad” music, which was brought to the international stage by acts ranging from The Chieftains to the singer Mary Black who once did a set there with the actor Steve Martin on the banjo.
Others who have visited or played there include, Billy Connolly who set part of a documentary there, the late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, the actor Jon Voight and the pioneer of Latin alternative music Manu Chao.
The planning proposals, which would have seen part of the pub retained as a listed structure but the remainder of the building, home to an Irish music and language school, demolished to make way for the hotel.
Giving its reasons, the city council said it considered “the development would be overbearing and significantly out of scale and character with the prevailing architectural context, and would represent substantial overdevelopment of this highly sensitive site”.
Mulligan said the owners of the site did not consult his family about the development and when news of the hotel emerged it just “galvanised a lot of people, because it was a kind of breaking point” over the perceived erosion of cultural heritage across Ireland.
Just made my submission on the Cobbletone Pub Planning Application: -"an over-scaled, crude, and soulless monument to greed. Dublin can, and must do better." https://t.co/u9xWiZFaF7 pic.twitter.com/rmORCRekoO
— Ciarán Cuffe (@CiaranCuffe) October 17, 2021
Green party MEP and architect Ciarán Cuffe, who was one of the objectors to planning application, described the plans as “an over-scaled, crude and soulless monument to greed”.
He said: “The Cobblestone has been an extraordinary venue for traditional Irish music that has attracted singers and musicians from all over the world. It is unthinkable that it would have been sanitised and become a cocktail bar of a 21st-century boutique hotel.”
The owner of the site, Marron Estates, have four weeks to appeal.
