A vote by Sligo Borough Council next Monday will determine whether an early 19th-century building next door to the town's imposing courthouse can be demolished to make way for an ultra-modern development.
Though the council decided three weeks ago, by six votes to five, not to include the threatened Teeling House in its list of protected structures, some members who favour retaining it will attempt to reverse this decision.
The Sligo county manager, Mr Hubert Kearns, recommended that the building should be listed because it was a high priority to retain historic buildings in the conservation area surrounding the recently renovated courthouse.
"It forms an important link between the modest terraced residential properties of Old Market Street and the grandeur of the courthouse and is therefore an integral part of an important streetscape in Sligo", he said.
Until this issue is resolved, the council has deferred a decision on plans by a local antiques dealer, Mr Louis Doherty, to replace Teeling House with a much larger building which would have retail units at street level and apartments overhead.
The new building has been designed by Scottish architects Gordon Murray and Alan Dunlop, who won this year's Best Commercial Building award from the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland for the Radisson SAS Hotel in Glasgow.
It was while staying at the Radisson on a trip to Scotland scouting for antiques that Mr Doherty sought out its architects and decided to commission them to design a new building for the highly sensitive Teeling House site in Sligo.
Mr Dunlop conceded that the scheme - their first in Ireland - was bound to be controversial, but he said it had been designed in a contemporary idiom following "exhaustive studies to try to understand that area of Sligo".
The existing building on the site was "in poor condition" and the architects saw no reason to retain it "simply because it's old". Their research showed that it was of little historical or architectural interest, other than dating from 1820.
Mr Dunlop said he could not understand why "all of a sudden it has become the most important building in Sligo". It would be a "regressive" decision if it was listed for protection, as An Taisce and the Heritage Service recommended.
Insisting that the architects wanted to replace it with "something much better", he said the new building would not compromise the High Victorian courthouse, dating from 1878, or the prominence of its characteristic steeple. Mr Dunlop said that trying to obtain development approval in Ireland was "like wading through treacle".
