For over 100 years, the Dargle River has repeatedly flooded homes alongside its banks in Bray, Co. Wicklow. Elderly and disabled residents (often living in single-storey houses), as well as families with young babies, have been the worst affected. 

Leaving destruction and human misery behind them, the floodwaters have then escaped, downriver, onto the old Bray Golf Club floodplain, to be stored safely until they could drain away. 

Now the combined plans of a private developer and the local public authority are threatening to block that escape route completely. Flood defences were completed along the Dargle in 2017 – but planning law in Ireland (since 2009) states flood defences must be ignored when zoning for Land Use. Mechanical failure, human error, climate change, and lack of maintenance are all cited as dangers, particularly upriver, as the flood waters will then be trapped on the residential side of the defence walls. The flood defence wall downriver from us has already failed twice since its completion, in 2015 and 2016. If the floodplain downriver is also dammed by private and public development, heavily polluted flood waters will rise higher, and remain, in the homes of Little Bray.

The owner/developers of the land – Ballymore Homes – are cynically attempting to circumvent the planning laws by dividing their applications for their 'Sea Gardens' development into three phases, starting in 2021 with building on the highest ground. The Flood Risk Management Guidelines demand that development on a floodplain can only be considered if there is no safer alternative land available. By building from the highest to the lowest ground, Ballymore can be sure there is no safer alternative when they apply to put high density building on the floodplain. 

Wicklow County Council has facilitated such ambitions by zoning the floodplain for Mixed Land Use in Bray’s 2018 Local Area Plan. Then, in 2022 the Council’s executive published a proposal to build a hugely expensive public transport cable suspension bridge across the Dargle at a point where its access road crosses the floodplain on the developer’s land. It will not take a single car off the badly congested main road from Dublin across the Dargle, but will instead divert badly needed public transport from Bray’s town centre across a private Sea Gardens development in an era of rapidly increasing coastal erosion… 

The bridge itself will threaten Bray’s magnificent mute swan colony on its flight path, ending on the opposite bank beside a narrow, crooked, and already dangerous junction between the seafront and the entrance to a small residential estate – Seapoint Court. 

This proposal has never been put to our 32 Wicklow county councillors for approval or otherwise - yet it already appears in NTA and Planning Commission documents as a ‘fait accompli’.  By law, such projects are a reserved function of councillors, not the executive. 

The making of the 2025 Local Area Plan for Bray is our 32 councillors’ chance to Save Bray by saving its floodplain, and so its riverside residents and its wildlife. By voting to change the Land Use on our 3.5ha floodplain back to its traditional, safe Open Space zoning in Bray’s upcoming Local Area Plan, they will also ensure that public transport serves our town, not a private development. 

Please sign this petition to ask our 32 Wicklow County councillors not to play  Russian roulette with the lives and homes of present – and future – riverside residents of Bray.  

And please continue also to follow our David vs Goliath fight by joining us on We Love Bray - Save Bray; Facebook and Instagram.  

Bray badly needs another bridge, but this is the wrong design in the wrong place. 

Thank you.