H&M becomes first retail shop to open in Clerys Quarter

The first retail shop has opened at Clerys Quarter on O’Connell Street in Dublin’s city centre.

For the first time in nearly ten years, people have been shopping in the building that once housed the famous Clerys department store before it closed down.

The Swedish retail giant H&M has opened offering women’s, men’s and children’s fashions.

The store is spread over two floors of the former Clerys and at 30,000sqft, it is the second largest store for H&M in Ireland.

Thirty jobs have been created and further jobs are due once Decathlon opens its doors later in the year.

Pret A Manger opened just before Christmas while other units including office spaces and restaurants are yet to be filled.

Shoppers were happy to be back at Clerys, many reminiscing about shopping in the building years ago.

One woman said it was great to be back in the shop that she described as “iconic”.

Another woman who got a discount on her purchases remembered visiting Clerys at Christmas with her parents “queueing to go see Santy on the big staircase”.

She said it was “good to be back, really nice to be shopping back in Clerys”.

Animal rights organisation PETA set up a small protest outside the store with two people dressed as ducks and geese.

It has urged H&M to end its sale of products that are made using feathers.

Spokesperson for PETA John Carmody said the group were there to bring attention to a global campaign that he said has exposed “rampant suffering and neglect, cruelty in slaughterhouses to geese and ducks so that they could be defeathered and sold in stores around the world”.

He said consumers are compassionate and that he hoped they would not buy products that had down feathers in them.

Core Capital are the developers along with their partners of the Clerys Quarter and its Managing Director Derek McGrath described the store opening as a “huge milestone”.

He said the project to bring the Clerys building back was like a “phoenix rising from the ashes”.