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Sorry people, Frank McDonald shouldn’t be let off the hook that easily. I’ve been reading his Irish Times column for years and he’s only recently started accepting that high rise has a place in Dublin. He has a lot of influence and for a long time he was like a bulldog guarding Dublin’s “historic low skyline”. I actually agree with him on many issues and have enjoyed his books but his phobia for buildings higher than five stories was always difficult to understand. It’s only in the last year or two that he’s admitted that some of the IFSC should be higher or that Dublin should have any tall buildings at all. Well Frank, it’s too late now to say that “some” of the buildings could have been higher now; the IFSC is covered in low density suburban office park buildings and as one of the most influential commentators in the country, you bear some of the blame for fermenting the high building phobia which in my opinion has retarded urban development in Dublin.

Obviously the DDDA deserve most of the blame; their stated policy was to cap the height of all buildings in the area and they never had an urban vision for the area. You could pluck the entire IFSC development and plonk it down on a green field site somewhere off the M50 and it wouldn’t look out of place.