Distillery blueprints for notorious Troubles prison to be decided upon next week

The plans for transforming a sizeable chunk of the old Crumlin Road Jail (often spelt “gaol”) will come before the city council’s planning committee on Tuesday night.

Such a development has long been mooted at the facility, with an earlier set of plans for a distillery given the green light back in 2013.

But question marks nevertheless continued to hover over the jail’s future, and new plans were put forward six years later.

The jail itself was designed by revered architect Charles Lanyon, who built many of Belfast’s best-known places, like the Custom House and Queen’s University Belfast’s main building.

It is a Grade A listed building (the highest level) and was finished in 1859.

It held both republicans and loyalists during the Troubles and was the scene of a bombing and a rocket attack in the early 1990s, before finally closing in 1996.

In recent times the jail has been opened for tourists, and rooms have been available for hire for music and functions.

The set of plans which councillors will debate at the 5pm meeting involve the transformation of ‘A Wing’ – one of the four three-floor wings of the jail – into an “operational whiskey distillery”.

The plans involve obtaining groundwater from the site, and also include creation of a “tourist centre and new car park”, with facilities including a bar and restaurant.

Planning officials have given the blueprints a provisional thumbs-up, subject to certain conditions.

Their report to the council says that the plans “will secure the future of the listed building and the use will contribute to the development of the wider site as a tourist attraction, complementing the existing tourist attraction offering.

“It is considered that the proposal will contribute to the regeneration of the wider north Belfast area in terms of employment, prosperity, physical improvement and the wider community.”

They recommended conditions including a guarantee that work begins in the next five years, and that historic features such as the cell doors remain intact.

The officials even detail the exact way the historic stonework should be washed.

It will ultimately be up to the committee’s 14 members to approve or reject the plans.

The outfit making the application is called simply Belfast Distillery Co Ltd.

It was set up in 2010 and currently has four directors, all of whom are American, and only one of which has a listed address in Northern Ireland: Michael V Cheek, based at Forthriver Business Park in west Belfast.

One former major inmate of ‘the Crum’ was high-ranking IRA intel figure Eamon Collins, who later rejected the group:

Click here: Eamon Collins murder 20 years on: From stupid and tragic to lonely and brutal

Click here: ‘Half the police and IRA would like to put killer of Eamon Collins up for OBE’

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