While local residents favour a cap of around eight storeys on any new buildings, some analysts predict that residential and commercial units measuring twice that height or even higher will eventually be built there.

The virtually unanimous decision of councillors to reject the draft Local Area Plan (LAP) put forward by city planners may have scuppered developer Sean Dunne's proposals to build a 32-storey tower block surrounded by a complex of 20storey units on land purchased for up to 52m per acre. But the actual height of whatever development is eventually sanctioned for the Jury's/Berkeley Court and Hume House area is still anyone's guess.

Nor is it certain how long it will be before alternative proposals for the area are drawn up and submitted for consideration by the council. Sooner rather than later is the consensus view, given that Dunne's interest repayments have been estimated at up to 18m per annum on money borrowed to purchase the sites. However, since it will be at least a year before the city council revisits the issue, the investment strategy of Dunne and other developers with a stake in the development of Dublin's embassy-belt area, including Bernard McNamara, Ray Grehan and David Courtney, looks increasingly high-risk.

According to one property source with extensive knowledge of the Ballsbridge market, the stakes are too high to leave the issue unresolved for any length of time. "I know the council has other considerations to take into account but I think ultimately the LAP will be redrawn and before very long you'll see alternative proposals put on the table. Dunne might not get his 32 storeys but he'll get a lot more than what's allowed under the current plan. I wouldn't be surprised to see some 20-storey buildings being erected, with other units averaging out at around 10."

Another property analyst believes rejecting the LAP was the wrong decision, not just from the developers' perspective but also in relation to the longterm interests of residents. "The whole area would have benefited from this LAP, " he says. "Everyone is talking these days about sustainability and the need to incorporate retail and services into developments so you don't end up with purely residential or purely commercial schemes. If I was a resident of Ballsbridge I would prefer to see this type of intense but well-balanced mixed development with lots of services for the local people rather than the reasonably low-rise but purely residential schemes that are likely to be built if they end up reverting back to the development plan currently in place.

"If you look at all the hotels that have been taken out of the Dublin market, Ballsbridge is crying out for a new quality hotel. In European cities where these kind of mixed-use schemes are popular it's not unusual to have a hotel incorporated into a high-rise residential complex.

That type of integrated development would enhance property values for everyone living in Ballsbridge."

"Who says we need more retail?" says local Labour councillor Dermot Lacey.

"Yes, we could do with some convenience shops but we don't need shopping centres.

As for open spaces, the area in front of the AIB building across from the RDS was originally designated as open space for sound planning reasons. The intention here was to build on it, right out to the footpath.

"There were aspects of Sean Dunne's plan that I thought were very good.

There were open spaces proposed that made the site more permeable. But all of this is centred on trying to facilitate excessive development. We are into a really dangerous area if we start planning the city based on extraordinary land prices.

We as councillors didn't want to do what journalists for years criticised Dublin City Council for doing, namely rezoning whole rafts of area with no longterm accountability. That more than the proposed highrise was the big problem with this LAP, the plan to rezone huge areas and leave them subject to no further serious analysis."

Lacey is scathing in his criticism of the the city council's planning department which he claims is inept and guilty of bad decision making.

"The planners, despite the authority granted to them by some journalists in this town, are invariably geography students who got a job in the city council. There's no great evidence of insight or authority there at all. It wasn't councillors who made a mess of Dublin city. It was the officials, under our appalling local-government system."

The way forward, the Labour councillor says, is for all interested parties . . .

including planning officials, councillors, developers and residents' representatives . . .

to sit down together "and see if we can hammer out some sort of agreement".

Gerry Breen, leader of the Fine Gael group on the council, says politicians felt under considerable pressure to endorse the LAP. "Under normal circumstances there is almost an automatic pressure applied to councillors, though not intentionally, to endorse proposals put forward by the city management. What I really resented in this instance was the spinning in the Irish Times and the Sunday Business Post. I know Dunne employed a PR company to spin for him.

'Council officials are moving towards. . .' was the drift of the piece in the Times on the Friday before the vote, implying that the councillors would be trammelled into agreeing to the scheme.

"That night there was a rugby scrum for places in the public gallery. We were being asked to write blank cheques in so far as we were rezoning from a variety of zonings to one zoning, Z10, for mixed residential and commercial use. The dogs in the street know Dunne and others paid over the odds for the lands in question. That's not my concern. I don't have a contract with Mr Dunne. I have a contract with the people I represent."

Local residents have also criticised council officials for the manner in which the LAP was drawn up.

A joint statement issued by 14 residents' associations claims: "The manner in which the rezoning process has been handled by the city officials has been underhand . . . it has proceeded with remarkable speed without going through the normal channels at council committee level, as would have been expected with a proposal that is, by far, the largest-scale development ever envisaged for the city."