The Ikea store that towers over the M50 motorway on the outskirts of north Dublin – the Republic’s only flagship “big blue box” store, in the Swedish-founded furniture retailer’s jargon – opened in 2009. Its construction came after years of political agonising over changes to planning rules, eventually introduced by the Fianna Fáil government in 2005 to allow a store five times larger than the then maximum regulated size. The debate centred around the opportunity to bring the retail multinational to the state for the first time, especially in the Ballymun area, which had been largely bypassed by the Celtic…

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