Bought for €115m by Michael O’Flynn 20 years ago, work now set to begin at Long Mile Rd site

The expression ‘It’s a long road with no turning’ has an Irish resonance.

The phrase was the title of a 1961 John B Keane novel: 65 years later, Irish developer Michael O’Flynn has a novel take on long, long roads, or specifically the Long Mile Rd in Dublin, where he paid €115m 20 years ago to car distributor Nissan for its 18-acre HQ.

The Naas Rd/Long Mile Rd has been an important stretch for centuries, originally for coaches in the 1700s and as the main road out of the capital to the South-West.

It was the M7 before its day, and well-known to generations of Cork and Limerick motorists as the last stretch of road and infamous dual carriageway before hitting Dirty Old Dublin’s city streets.

This month, the long, wide, and sometimes bleak-looking Long Mile Rd is finally about to transition from its 20th-century industrial and motor-car past to a high-density urban quarter, part of Dublin’s City Edge urban regeneration that may, in time, become a sustainable, tightly planned urban quarter for up to 80,000 residents.

It’s been a long road: The former Nissan Facility HQ site on the corner of the long Mile Road and The Naas Road in Dublin — acquired by O’Flynn Group 20 years ago for €115m, is now set for 1,140 apartments. Picture: Nick Bradshaw

Significant players in that long-term ambition for City Edge (with central elements, also known as Southwest Gate, or Southwest Quarter) are a core trio of adjacent sites: The Concorde industrial site, targeted at build-to-rent; the Royal Liver 1900s retail park lands, now bought by the Land Development Agency (LDA), for 1,000 cost-rental apartments; an office tower and urban quarter, and, finally, O’Flynn’s former Nissan site, the largest of the trio and one of the biggest privately controlled development plots in Dublin.

As a test case for high-density suburban regeneration, and on the LUAS red line since 2004, City Edge is one of the largest regeneration sites in Europe and likely to be as
transformative as Dublin’s revolutionised Docklands, Cherrywood, and Sandyford (at the latter, famously, another Cork developer, John Fleming, paid peak Celtic Tiger prices of €165m, or €20m an acre, in 2005 for the eight-acre Allegro site, in total spending €265m as part of a larger site acquisition that fell by the wayside after the
economic crash.) 

It’s taken this long for the Long Mile Rd Southwest Quarter core development parties to get ‘shovels in the ground,’ with the confirmation this week that the Land Development Agency is to fund 542 cost-rental apartments (ie, renting at 25% below market rents) at Michael O’Flynn’s long-held Nissan site on the Naas Rd, where he has planning for 1,142 apartments, plus a 148-bed, 15-storey hotel tower, just a few floors shy of his 2008-completed, 17-floor Elysian in Cork city centre.

NAAS SAYERS

Dublin’s future Southwest Quarter hardly got the moniker from the Cork origins of Nissan site owner Michael O’Flynn, who spoke of its clear potential back when he paid €115m for it c20 years ago, highlighting the LUAS line’s parallel proximity even in its earlier days.

It’s taken this long for him to see a corner now being turned at this Long Mile Rd site.

But it’s not the only site he’s had to sit tight on, waiting for timing and jigsaw elements to chime: After all, he bought Cork’s Dunkathel House in 2003 (for €25m) and it’s only now, in 2026, that homes are under construction there, having been leap-frogged in delivery by his adjacent Ballinglanna development (600 homes).

Phase one at Dunkathel is for 550 homes, with scope to total 1,000 after a second/later phase, and while it includes apartments, it’s more of a mix of home types than Southwest Quarter’s mostly apartments in substantial blocks.

HOME FRONT

The O’Flynn Group also delivered a c 600-unit house/apartment mix at the mixed-use Ballincollig town centre urban quarter/ex-barracks site, close to the O’Flynn family home.

The company started building in 1978, scaled up hugely in the 1990s, and after the likes of Rochestown’s Mount Oval Village (800 units+, started in the late 1990s) now has built 15,000 houses in Ireland, predominantly in Cork, followed by Dublin.

To its considerable output-to-date tally might be added a further 9,000 student beds in the UK, while it also has mixed developments and investments in Germany, via a company unironically called Tiger Developments that was founded in 1999, before the Celtic Tiger became quite the thing.

Back to the future, and at Dublin 12’s Southwest Quarter and in increasingly uncertain times, it’s notable how the key to delivery of projects of scale can be State involvement via the likes of supports such as Project Tosaigh and the Land Development Agency: LDA’s partnership buy-in on 542 cost-rental apartments, confirmed this week, enables the 1,140-unit Long Mile Rd Nissan site to get into first gear, with much more to come.

It’s been a long road, indeed, but a turn is on the way.