It couldn’t be simpler… We love Bray and we don’t want to see it destroyed.
The people of Bray deserve to be heard – the proposed bridge development (a hangover from the Celtic Tiger) just doesn’t make sense.
It won’t help transport,
it will make flooding more dangerous and more likely,
and it’ll kill Bray’s wildlife, especially Bray’s famous Swans. There’s a lot of native wildlife and heritage in this area, that’s proposed to be bulldozed aside for a pointless and ridiculous bridge – that doesn’t even have the funding reserved to be finished!!
Now there’s another threat to flood protection, our swans, and road safety… The owners of the former Bray Golf Club lands, Shankill Property Investments aka Ballymore, have put in an application to build on the lowlands of this site. Their application, if it succeeds, will create immediate flooding and road safety dangers to our community, and cruel flight hazards to our swans. It is also designed around the proposed access road to the supposedly ‘sustainable’ public transport bridge that SaveBray was set up to oppose on the grounds of it being ‘the wrong design in the wrong place’.
If you would like to help us in this latest phase of our fight, please go to our Submissions page here.
Deadlines for submissions to Wicklow County Council are very soon!
- If you are submitting online through Wicklow Co Co’s online planning, then the deadline for submission and for payment (online) is before midnight on Sunday, 27th April;
- If you are submitting via email to plandev@wicklowcoco.ie then your submission must be in by midnight on Sunday, 27th April, but your payment has to be in before 5pm on Friday, 25th April, as otherwise the accounts dept. in Wicklow Co Co (tel: 0404.20148) is closed till Monday and your submission will be invalidated;
- If you are submitting a hard copy then you have till 5pm on Monday, 28th April, for both your submission and your payment to be delivered to Wicklow Co Co offices in Wicklow town.
So act now, please!
Thanks to your generous financial support, we were able to win our fight in the High Court to over-turn An Bord Pleanala’s decision that Wicklow County Council’s proposed bridge and access roads did not need an Environmental Impact Assessment! Unfortunately, we are now back in the High Court, reinvesting the money we saved there for yet another Judicial Review. This time we are appealing permission from An Bord Pleanala to Ballymore for an earlier application (this time on the high ground of the old golf links), which included a Condition that required the developers to provide “precise details” of how they could tie in their development with Wicklow’s unauthorised Part 8 proposal! Again, we are fund-raising – because court cases are expensive – and if you would like to continue to help, you can donate at:
https://www.gofundme.com/savebray
How is all of this being allowed to happen? To make a long complicated story short, we can’t figure that out either! Everyone we talk to thinks the bridge is a bad and dangerous idea. It actively contradicts the Council, National, EU and even UN directives on protecting Wildlife, Rivers, and ecosystems… not to mention the local people!
…And we have yet to meet anyone who thinks building on a floodplain is a good idea – particularly the thousands of people all across the world, including Ireland, who have suffered devastation from flooding in this year alone.
So on this website we will call for our County Councillors – and our Planners – to commit to Save Bray! Our county councillors have the power – and the responsibility – to save our floodplain from private and public development by rezoning the 3.5ha Flood Zone A for Land Use as Open Space in the upcoming Local Area Plan for Bray. Our planners have the power – and the responsibility – to judge this latest planning application from Ballymore as ‘premature‘ pending the next Local Area Plan; pending a revised, safe new application from these developers; and pending a comprehensive traffic plan that really works for Bray.
Let’s put our People Power behind them…