The council’s own senior conservation expert recommended outright refusal. A total of 61 public submissions were made, most opposed. A petition was signed by nearly 24,000 people. Dublin City Council granted permission anyway.

When asked to explain itself, the council declined to comment, directing queries to its online planning portal.

And so at the weekend, Dubliners gathered outside St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre in protest, having exhausted every other avenue available to them.

The €100million scheme is being advanced by DTDL Limited, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands.

The ultimate beneficial owners – those who stand to profit most from redeveloping this landmark at the top of Grafton Street – are not publicly known.

The plan is for more than 29,000 square metres of office space, thousands of office workers promised to a city already awash with empty desks, where vacancy rates have hovered close to 18–20%. High-end offices with roof terraces overlooking St Stephen’s Green, while retail is squeezed and civic life thins out.

This is not merely a planning decision, it is a declaration of priorities. A blunt statement about whose city Dublin is – and who it’s really for.

St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is not a perfect building. Its upper floors have long felt underused, its retail mix uneven. Critics have called it a stranded Mississippi riverboat marooned at the edge of Dublin’s most important Victorian park.

However, it says something. It has genuine, irreplaceable character – wrought iron and glass that echoes the Victorian glasshouses of the National Botanic Gardens, a material language long embedded in the city.

It responds to the Georgian bones of its neighbourhood rather than erasing them.

If the upper floors are underused, if the retail mix is tired, then invest, reconfigure, reimagine. There is plenty that can be done to bring St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre back to life, properly, without tearing its face off and replacing it with something that could have been built anywhere in Europe.

The approved scheme will fundamentally change one of the most important corners in Dublin. In place of the theatrical, curved white facade will rise a taller, flatter structure dominated by pale stone fins and glass.

The council’s own Grade 1 conservation architect, Mary McDonald, submitted a formal assessment days before the decision. The proposed development would be ‘overly high, blocky, monolithic, dominant and overwhelming’, she warned.

The facade would be ‘overly flat’, the elevations ‘paper-thin’, and more than 10 metres higher than the existing structure.

On a site of this importance, she concluded, only a building of the highest quality – ‘an exemplar of the future architectural heritage of the city’ – would suffice.

She did not recommend granting permission.

The planning officer overruled her. The design, he concluded, was ‘acceptable’.

Not exceptional, not distinguished, not beautiful, simply acceptable – a word in which beauty is absent and joy does not enter. That is the standard Dublin City Council has set for the most important corner of the most important street in the country.

The planners also rejected recommendations to salvage the 1988 Millennium mosaic and the decorative clock attributed to Cork clockmaker Chris Stokes, installed to lift a city during one of its darkest economic periods. They were deemed an ‘unsatisfactory visual impact’.

The memories of a city, it seems, are expendable too.

One long-standing trader suggests that pain does not require demolition as its remedy. Sophia Maniar, proprietor of Asha Dublin, has operated in the shopping centre since its opening in 1988, making her one of its longest standing tenants.

‘I don’t want to stay living in the past as if in a time-warp,’ she says. ‘But reconstruction is not the answer to bringing this tired centre back to life and into the 21st Century. I absolutely agree that the centre could be rejuvenated while retaining its character. Demolition is not the answer by any means.’

The public response to the proposed replacement, she adds, has been one of acute upset, ‘expressing disappointment towards yet another gloomy, brutalist building with no character to replace a most-iconic structure of Dublin city’.

Yusuf Alraqi graduated in architectural science from UCD and is now studying medicine there.

He is also, with a handful of friends, the person most responsible for the campaign that has brought nearly 24,000 people to sign a petition and a crowd to the street today.

He watched the original application get refused by An Coimisiún Pleanála in July 2025, then watched the developers come back in December with a revised scheme. His verdict on the changes was withering.

‘They basically just added a tree,’ he says. ‘It felt very superficial and quite cynical – like it had been thrown together quickly. A lot of people I spoke to were surprised that the developers hadn’t really engaged with the criticism. It almost looked like they were giving up – and then Dublin City Council approved it anyway.’

Not everyone inside the centre shares the same conclusion – and their voices deserve to be heard.

Dermot O’Grady has run The Green Gallery on the top floor for 31 years. He’s under no illusions about what the building has become. ‘The centre needs a serious revamp,’ he says plainly. ‘It’s been going downhill – a slow bleed, so to speak.’

He describes years of traders operating on short-term licences rather than leases, because the owners needed flexibility to redevelop.

For O’Grady, the pragmatic reality is that the centre as it stands is not financially viable. It needs profit to survive, and profit requires change.

He would have preferred to see some parts retained – ‘I personally would have loved to have been able to save the outer front atrium’ – but believes the time for that conversation has passed.

‘They’ll keep on trying anyway until they get approval,’ he says. ‘In the meantime, daily shoppers and key holders are suffering.’

It is an honest account, and it reflects something important – there is genuine pain inside this building that has nothing to do with the campaign against its demolition.

Walk down Grafton Street today and you can already feel what is happening. It is like looking at the face of someone you once loved and noticing a missing tooth – something is wrong, something is gone, but it takes a moment to place exactly what.

The street that was once a living expression of Dublin’s character is being quietly replaced, shop by shop, by the same international chains. River Island, Disney, Marks & Spencer, a neon-pink Victoria’s Secret glaring beside the warm terracotta of Bewley’s – one of the great cafes of Europe – as if beauty and gaudiness have simply been told to get along.

They cannot. And they should not have to.

Grafton Street is the spine of this city – a street of buskers and flower sellers, of familiar faces and impromptu performances, a place where the city comes alive in a way that no algorithm could design and no developer could replicate.

St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is its full stop – the theatrical, characterful flourish at the top that tells you: this is Dublin. Not London, not Manchester, not anywhere else.

What is proposed replaces that full stop with an ellipsis – a vague, uncommitted gesture toward a city that no longer quite knows what it wants to be.

Andrea Horan, entrepreneur and founder of Tropical Popical on nearby South William Street, has put it better than most. ‘The current centre creates an aura for Dublin, the sense you couldn’t be anywhere else,” she says.

As we travel farther only to feel like we’re in the same place but different – the same brands, the same chains – we cling to the things that create difference, that create texture.

‘We want an authentic Dublin, not a pastiche,’ she says.

She’s right. This fight is no longer just about one building, it is about what kind of city Dublin chooses to become.

The scheme has been designed by BKD Architects, with O’Donnell + Tuomey brought in specifically to redesign the key corner frontage after the first refusal. John Tuomey, the practice’s founding director, wrote to the Mail in thoughtful defence of his approach. The intention, he explained, was ‘to open up the corner, to provide a stone-paved public space, a civic meeting place where Grafton Street meets the Green’.

He cited Georgian precedents in brick and stone and noted that much of the existing structural frame would be retained.

It is a sincere and considered explanation, and Tuomey is a serious architect whose work this country has every reason to respect. But when I look at the renders, I struggle to find the connection he describes.

What I see is a building characterised by a flat curtain of glass and pale stone fins, stretching upward with little sense of rhythm, weight or joy.

Graham Hickey, director of the Dublin Civic Trust, describes the design as ‘a confused amalgam’ of Dublin’s brick streetscape and stone-faced civic tradition.

In trying to marry the two, he argues, the brick element is exaggerated to the point of parody to match the large commercial frame behind. ‘It’s deeply unsatisfying,’ he says.

Marta Hervás Oroza, architect and co-founder of the Save St Stephen’s Green campaign, believes the strength of feeling goes beyond style. Through her research, she found that people in Dublin and beyond have strong personal connections to the centre – precisely what makes a building iconic and worth preserving.

She rejects the idea that its postmodern character diminishes its value. Its bold, expressive difference, she argues, is what has allowed it to embed so strongly in the life of the city.

Architecture becomes historic not just through the passage of time, she contends, but through the imprint it leaves in people’s lives and in the culture of a place.

When Imelda May speaks, people listen. The proud Liberties Dubliner recently recorded a video inside the centre, beneath its wrought iron and glass.

‘Can you believe the beautiful St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is going to be demolished?’ she asked.

She spoke not in abstractions but in specifics. She shops at Soho Market for her stage costumes, she brings her daughter Violet for Japanese cheesecake at the food hall. These are the small, exact rituals that make a place matter. Not floor area, not office capacity, Japanese cheesecake.

‘They can’t tear this down and put another generic piece of s**t in our lovely city,’ she said plainly. ‘Save it.’

Nearly 24,000 people agreed. Dublin City Council does not.

David McGuire, a business analyst from Longford who has lived in Dublin for 15 years, describes the proposed building with withering precision.

‘It’s not ugly, it’s just... there’s nothing,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t draw it, a child couldn’t draw it. Your eye doesn’t know where to go. If it were ugly, at least you’d react. But this, there’s nothing to react to.’

He sees a cyclical amnesia at work. ‘People were outraged when the Georgian buildings and the Dandelion Market were demolished. Now we’re demolishing what replaced them? We’re just repeating the same mistake.’

Dublin cinematographer Roddy Murray frames the loss in psychological terms.

‘What strikes me about St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is that it actually says something,’ he says. ‘There’s intention behind it – the symmetry, the theatricality, it’s expressive.’

He recently filmed in Rome.

‘The whole city is beauty for beauty’s sake,’ he notes. ‘Architecture affects how people feel. When everything becomes interchangeable, cities start to feel anonymous – like they could be anywhere at all.’

The decision now lies with An Coimisiún Pleanála, which has confirmed it has received two valid third-party appeals on this case. The window to submit further appeals remains open until May 18, with observations on the latest appeal accepted until May 27.

A previous version of this scheme was refused in July 2025 for lacking a coherent aesthetic and sufficient placemaking. These appeals will test whether the revision meaningfully addresses those failings – or merely, as Yusuf Alraqi put it, added a tree.

St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is not perfect. But it belongs here – the balconies, the clock, the first escalator generations rode, the boutique where Imelda May finds her stage clothes, the Japanese cheesecake. These things are not trivial. These things are Dublin.

Once it is gone – replaced by a €100million machine for generating rent, owned by an anonymous offshore fund, approved by a council that overruled its own conservation expert and then refused to answer for that decision – it is gone forever.

Nearly 24,000 people – and a crowd on the street over the weekend – are saying, this is not good enough. Dublin City Council gave this the green light. An Coimisiún Pleanála can still turn it off.

The clock, for now, is still ticking.