Planning sought for €35m distillery

Consultants working on behalf of William Grant & Sons will submit a planning application for a new Tullamore distillery with Offaly planners early next week, the Offaly Independent can exclusively reveal this week. The move comes just over six months after the company first announced plans to invest €35m in a state-of-the-art pot still and malt whiskey distillery in Tullamore, reviving the town's historic distilling tradition. A planning notice relating to the project appears in today's edition of the Offaly Independent. Once the application is lodged with Offaly County Council members of the public will have five weeks to lodge submissions or observations in relation to the application. According to the new application William Grant & Sons Irish Manufacturing Ltd is seeking a ten-year grant of planning permission for the development of a new distillery at Ballard and Clonminch in Tullamore. The proposed development includes a pot and malt distillery building, a visitors' centre incorporating a restaurant and shop area, a visitor car park to accommodate 70 cars and three coaches and an employee car park with 52 spaces. Also included in the proposal is a gate house, a weigh bridge, a tank farm, cooling towers, a co-products building including a boiler house, cereal silos, a filling store, 13 warehouses, an administration building, a small warehouse, a cooperage, a dunnage warehouse, a grain distillery, spent grain sheds, a barrel yard, receivers, high level pipe bridging, two storm and fire water retention ponds and two earth mounds. Application is also made for a new access roundabout to the N52. The development will also require the demolition of a derelict farmhouse. Buildings included in the proposed development are said to range in height from 5.6 metres to 17.4 metres, except for the grain distillery which will have a stack height of 32.48 metres. A Stage 1 Appropriate Assessment Screening Report and an Environmental Impact Statement will also be submitted to council planners with the application. Should permission for the project be given it's thought the project's two-year construction phase would create something in the region of 100 jobs. The opening of such a distillery would see the production of Tullamore Dew return home for the first time since the original distillery closed in 1954. It would also push company employee numbers from approximately twelve (employed at the Tullamore Dew Visitor Centre on Bury Quay) to about 25. Speaking earlier this year when plans were announced Tullamore Dew Global Brand Director Shane Hoyne described the proposed distillery as a "real and emotional home" for the Tullamore Dew brand.