After years of unsuccessful use as a shopping mall, a warehouse at the very heart of Dublin may soon be converted into a cultural masterpiece in the form of a much desired contemporary art museum. The location wasn't suitable for a shopping center, but sitting so near to the city's center makes it the perfect site for a museum, a fact that local city planners now plan to capitalize on.

An unparalleled opportunity exists for the creation of a contemporary art museum in the centre of Dublin, in the early 19th-century Stack A warehouse at the edge of George’s Dock. This is arguably the city’s most unsuccessful shopping mall, with only 20 per cent of the units still trading.

The irony is that the original 1986 masterplan for redeveloping the Custom House Docks earmarked Stack A for just such a cultural use. But in 1987, then taoiseach Charles J Haughey decreed that the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) should go to the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.

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