A PLAN TO demolish a Dublin hotel featured in the James Joyce classic Ulysses has been refused.

Monteco Holdings, a company owned by the owner of Premier League football side QPR Tony Fernandes, had applied to put a six-storey hotel in on the site of the city centre hotel.

However, An Bord Pleanala has unanimously ruled against the plan.

They say that the hotel would have a “monolithic design and unsympathetic proportions” that would “seriously injure the surviving grain, rhythm and character of Ormond Quay Upper that forms part of the Liffey Quays Conservation Area”.

“The proposed development, by reason of its orientation, height, and bulk and its proximity to adjacent residential buildings, and in particular to No. 12 Strand Street Little, would be both visually obtrusive when viewed from existing windows and would result in loss of daylighting, which would seriously injure the residential amenities of those dwellings and would, therefore, be contrary to the proper planning and sustainable development of the area.”

The €20 million investment would have seen the facade of the hotel totally altered, something that An Taisce and the James Joyce Centre objected to.

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