THE Opera Centre development in the heart of Limerick city is now a fully funded project after the Council of Europe Bank (CEB) announced it will match the €85m funding loaned by the European Investment Bank.
The announcement means that Opera Centre will become a fully backed €170m project aimed at rejuvenating the heart of Limerick City centre.
However Denis Brosnan, Limerick 2030 chairman, said that he hopes the delays in the project to date are set aside to allow the development advance at an improved pace.
Recalling the journey to date, Mr Brosnan said “it has been a long journey for the rejuvenation of of the city after a taskforce was created in the wake of the 2009 Dell jobs axing.
“At the time, we were asked what would rejuvenate Limerick city and the Mid West and we were tasked to start thinking and come up with proposals outlining what could be done.
“We started with Shannon Airport taking over its own ownership and to merge the local authorities etc, They are all known, but as we moved through 2010 and 2011, when the recession really started to bite, we saw major sites in the city centre going in to Nama with the risk that they would become derelict and remain so for a very long time.
The local authority was advised that they must start looking at these sites with a view to buying them, the former Kerry Group chair said.
“If the local authority owned the sites then they could develop them in line with their own thinking of the shape of the city.
“Look at the hanging Gardens site, that is what happened there and we expect that to be fully let long before the builders hand it over – that represents the demand that exists now in Limerick.
“All the companies that have come to Limerick, either coming for the first time or those that are expanding, are looking for somewhere to work and live and Limerick can offer that”.
Referring to the Opera Site, Mr Brosnan said that it is the design of what Limerick City Centre should look like.
“We need shopping and office buildings to bring people back in to work and in time we need residential, but all in a logical order,” Mr Brosnan explained, adding that the design proposals have been worked on for last two years.
Speaking of the EIB funding, Mr Brosnan said that the easy part of the Opera project was the design, “funding it was the difficult bit”.
Expected to cost between €170m and €180m the Opera plans look to satisfy a mixed use purpose but Mr Brosnan said that it would be “commercially unviable to put a lot of residential space on to the plan because it is a very expensive site to work in”.
The Limerick 2030 chairman cited the expense associated with developing the Georgian buildings that hug two sides of the site.
“Commercial developers would be slow to move in because of the costs associated with keeping those Georgian properties as intact as possible and Georgian properties as residential don’t mix very well.”
“Limerick 2030 is charged not just with building commercial space, but with all the space that is required.”
Mr Brosnan said that other projects around Limerick are moving along apace and work on a major housing development in Mungret would be brought along in tandem with the Opera development.
Looking at the marquee elements of the design plans, Mr Brosnan noted the “tower building will be something that stands out and marks Limerick.
“But it is actually all the other properties where we have to merge, the office space and the other properties that will be the more expensive to preserve and update.
“What’s going to stand out there is that we preserve the Georgian character with a centre core with some convenience retail to support the infrastructure where people can converge.
“We want the tower itself of 14 or 15 storeys to be a place which people, when they drive in to Limerick, see as a beacon for the city”.
The Limerick 2030 chairman said “we are also working quietly in the background on the Cleeves site which is the largest of all the properties at 10 acres.
“All theses sites are going to have their uniqueness but we don’t have all the ideas of what should go on Cleeves at this point in time. There is one view that it should be a convention centre and another that there should be some residential there.
“All of that will go in to the melting pot for the next month or so,” he said.
“To design Cleeves, we will seek to find what is right for the city of Limerick and what people will look back on in 50 or 100 years time and say that they got it very right”.
However Mr Brosnan noted the speed at which the Opera Centre was progressing.
“It is held up in planning and it is not going at the speed we would all like in that process and my concern is that the Gardens will be fully let and will be moving in to occupation this time next year and perhaps the Opera wont even have started.
“There has been huge momentum in filling empty space and bringing jobs to Limerick and I think there is going to be a major difficulty as we move in to 2019/2020 where there will be far greater demand than there will be space available.
“We just need to get some way to get ourselves through this.
“The hold ups are through objections and observations which the planning authority in Limerick, and rightly so, is ploughing or teasing its way through.
“Everybody is waiting for Opera space but all we can do is sit on our hands and wait until we get planning. It’s ironic that we have all the design done, it’s ironic that we have all the funding in place but we will have to wait for an unknown period of time before we can take the next step,” he said.
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