Upwardly mobile
The extremity of the city’s boundary with the harbour, this undeveloped hinterland was slow to be capitalised on, despite its manifest attractions of waterside location and open aspect framed by mature trees.
But the arrival of the Mahon Point shopping centre just a year ago, and its spin-off neighbourhood transformation, has placed the peninsula firmly on house-hunters’ map, with tall apartment towers, €560,000-plus penthouses, and that ultimate arbiter of status, a €1 million house sale. Where developer Owen O’Callaghan instinctively saw retail openings many moons ago and went eagle-eyed for the bulk of the 111-acre Mahon land sale by Cork City Council in the late 1990s, joint site developers, the McCarthy family, saw a waterfront residential enclave.