A public consultation is open now on the Hillcrest Road plans for road safety improvements. The full plans can be viewed on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council’s website here, but I’ll give a short summary here that’s more readable than all the technical documentation.
If you have views on the Hillcrest Road plans, you can make a submission through the public consultation survey here. Alternatively, you make a submission by emailing [email protected] or in writing to Senior Engineer, Capital Projects Office, Infrastructure and Climate Change Department, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, Marine Road, Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin A96 K6C9.
In addition to formally making a submission through the official channels above, you can also email your views with me directly on [email protected].
What is the Hillcrest Road improvement project?
The plan is to upgrade Hillcrest Road in Sandyford, adding proper footpaths and cycle tracks on both sides of the road, widening the road to safe standard widths (6.5m-wide carriageway) and associated works. Currently the road only has a narrow footpath on one side of the road and some parts of the road are so narrow that even 2 small cars will nearly clip their wing mirrors off each other as they pass.
As part of the project, the construction team will try as far as possible to carry out underground utility works such as undergrounding electricity cables, upgrading water infrastructure and facilitating broadband upgrades. Some of this will depend on whether these utility companies have their act together to carry out their side of these works as the council are upgrading the road.
Part of the project involves the council “CPO-ing” private land from property owners on Hillcrest Road. CPO means Compulsory Purchase Order which is a power given to councils and other public bodies to purchase pieces of land that are necessary for important public infrastructure. There is a legal process to follow and the council have made contact with all landowners to begin that process.
You can see all the documentation and details to do with the project here on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown’s consultation portal (keep scrolling down, all the reports are at the bottom).
What stage is the Hillcrest Road improvement project at?
For a project like this to go ahead, the council have to do a significant amount of engineering plans and reports to prepare for a planning application. When a council makes planning applications, they have to get permission from the councillors through a process known as “Part 8”. This just means that the process is set out in Part 8 of the Planning Act 2000.
I wrote before about the work the council have been doing on the Hillcrest Road plans over the past few years and they have kept councillors up to date on that progress.
On 7th May 2025, the council published the plans to begin the 6 week mandatory public consultation period. Any member of the public can make their views known through this public consultation. Once the consultation is over, the council’s engineering team will put together a report (the “Part 8 Report”)detailing all the issues raised in the submissions. The engineering team can include a recommendation in their report to make changes to the project based on the public consultation, or to keep the project as is.
What happens after the public consultation?
After the public consultation, the Part 8 Report gets sent to all 40 Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown councillors for consideration. At the next subsequent county council meeting, councillors will have the opportunity to make changes to the project, approve the project or reject the project. This happens by vote, or if all councillors are in agreement, it can be approved without a vote.
If the project is approved, the council’s engineering team need to finalise the detailed designs and invite tenders for a construction contractor to build the project. This would normally take 1-2 years on a project of this size. So far, the estimates from the engineers is that construction of this project will take around 9-12 months.
