Westside Shopping Center

Westside Shopping Centre operates on Seamus Quirke Road in Galway city as the sixth and final property in Davidson Kempner Capital Management’s 2015 “Cornerstone Portfolio” acquisition, a €118 million purchase of six distressed Irish regional shopping centres, alongside Athlone, MacDonagh Junction, Gorey, Tipp Town and Orwell covered elsewhere in this catalog.

Dunnes Stores anchors the property, with McDonald’s and Peter Murphy Lighting and Electrical among the other established tenants, alongside O’Hehir’s Bakery Café and a Bank of Ireland ATM. The centre serves the wider Newcastle and Westside areas on Galway’s western side.

Westside Shopping Centre Limited, the entity managing the property on the portfolio’s behalf, secured planning permission for a roughly €31 million strategic housing development on part of the centre’s car park, a 240-bed student accommodation block with an integrated café, developed by JFA and due for completion in 2026. The project removed 94 of the property’s roughly 332 existing parking spaces, reducing the car park to 238 spaces, and has drawn some local concern over reduced parking availability and construction disruption, including the retirement of one long-standing local tenant after 38 years in the centre.

That student-housing redevelopment on surplus car park land, built directly onto an existing distressed-portfolio shopping centre rather than a standalone site, illustrates how institutional owners of older Irish regional malls have increasingly looked to underused parking areas as a source of additional development value once retail-only economics alone no longer justify the site’s full footprint.