Corporation’s behaviour over site ‘paranoid’

GOVERNMENT officials regarded Dublin Corporation’s behaviour over the development of Wood Quay as “ridiculous” and “paranoid”.

Documents reveal huge pressures were still being exerted from all sides in the controversial project to build the Corporation’s headquarters on the site of the former Viking settlement five years after the long-planned project began in earnest.

In February 1980, the Corporation’s Planning and Development Committee wrote to Taoiseach Charles Haughey seeking a special allocation of £4-5 million plus any available European funding “to provide compensation involved in implementing the Council’s expressed desire to have a rethink about a complete redesign of the plans for the Wood Quay site”.