Charlestown

Charlestown Shopping Centre opened in October 2007 on St. Margaret’s Road, north of Finglas village in Dublin 11, anchored by Dunnes Stores with a residential component of apartments built above the retail podium. Sports Direct, Boots, Eddie Rocket’s, Card Factory and David Cullen Jewellers rounded out the opening-phase tenant roster.

A second phase opened in October 2015, adding a nine-screen Odeon cinema and a Leisureplex entertainment center with bowling and Quasar laser-tag facilities. A third phase added car dealership showrooms to the wider development over the following years, an unusual retail-format addition reflected in this catalog’s tenant data by a genuinely dense cluster of car brands, including Joe Duffy’s BMW, MINI, Volkswagen and Motorrad (motorcycle) franchises, alongside a separate Porsche Centre Dublin and a Scania truck dealership.

The center is served by local bus routes including Go-Ahead Ireland’s N6, connecting it to the wider Finglas and north Dublin transit network; a Luas Green Line extension from the current Broombridge terminus has been proposed to serve the property directly, though the project has not secured funding.

That multi-phase build-out, retail anchor in 2007, cinema and leisure complex in 2015, then a cluster of car dealerships added subsequently, reflects a genuinely unusual expansion pattern: most Irish shopping centres add fashion or grocery tenants as they grow, but Charlestown instead diversified into large-format automotive retail, a tenant category more commonly found in standalone dealership parks than inside a conventional shopping centre’s official phased development.