page_title: Ballymun
section_title: Ballymun tower blocks
hierarchical_section_title: Ballymun / History / Ballymun tower blocks
caption_attribution_description: English: Tower in ballymun as of April 2007
context_page_description: Ballymun is an outer suburb of Dublin, Ireland, at the northern edge of the Northside, the development of which began in the 1960s to accommodate a housing crisis in inner city areas of Dublin. The area became well known for its high-rise tower blocks and flat complexes. It has several sub-districts such as Sillogue and Poppintree, and is in close proximity to Dublin Airport.
  In 1997, a regeneration plan was announced, which led to demolition of the flats and their replacement by new low-rise housing and some civic amenities, but also saw the loss of most of the area's shops. The regeneration had cost about one billion euro as of 2016.
context_section_description: Among the opprobrium heaped on Ballymun, the deployment of the flats has been described by the environmental journalist Frank McDonald, in his book The Construction of Dublin, as the Irish state's 'worst planning disaster'. However, at the time of its construction, Ballymun was a sought-after location and prospective tenants had to pass an interview to get housing there.  There were three types of apartment building: seven fifteen-storey towers, nineteen eight-storey blocks and ten four-storey blocks. The flats were built in the 1960s under the authority of Neil Blaney, the then Fianna Fáil Minister for Local Government.
  According to geographer Joe Brady of University College Dublin, Dublin Corporation were sceptical about the Ballymun scheme:
  They were made an offer by... Blaney which they couldn't refuse. He offered to build them 2,500 housing units at a time when their own housing development programme had to be ramped up and when you had the additional misfortune of the collapse of the tenement blocks in Fenian Street which meant that Dublin Corporation was bounced into dealing with all of its condemned houses at once... They would have taken anything from anybody at that point.
  The first tenants moved in between August 1966 and December 1966. By February 1969, when the National Building Agency's contract for Ballymun ceased and control of Ballymun was handed to Dublin Corporation, there was a total of 3,021 dwellings, all of which was publicly owned social housing.
caption: A former Ballymun Tower
exif: {}