Reply To: Beamish’s contempt for Cork

Apologies for not responding to the various posts on this thread but I was away last week until the end of the week.

I had a meeting with Beamish on last Friday 13th and they told me “There is nothing you can do that will make us change this”!

To put this comment in context, I was invited to a meeting in Beamish where I met with 3 executives from Beamish Eamonn O’Sullivan, customer services director; Stephen Murphy financial director and Jim D’Arcy production director. They told me that the discussions were to be considered confidential as there was information they were giving me which could be considered commercially sensitive so I won’t go into any of the specifics mentioned.

Basically what they said was they are aware of the state of the building but that they are under commercial pressures and that the commercial pressures force them to prioritise other projects before the restoration of their buildings or put another way Beamish knows about the state of the buildings but doesn’t feel strongly enough about it to spend the necessary money on restoration.

Then they asked me, in light of this new information, would I take the site down?!!!

Of course, I said no – my logic was that if I left the site up that might put pressure on them and force the restoration up their list of priorities – taking the site down would do nothing for the buildings.

This is when they told me that there was nothing I could do which would make any difference to their priorities. Then they said they were very disappointed with my decision to leave the site up, thank you and goodbye. It was unbelieveable, having said I was going to leave the site up and giving my reasons, I was more or less thrown out – very politely, Stephen showed me to the door and said “Eamonn says goodbye”!

I can understand that they have competitive pressures – what business doesn’t – but they seriously expected that having told me that, that I would immediately take the site down, thereby taking away any reason for them to do anything about it.

By the way, the site is currently 21st in Google’s found set in searches for the term Beamish, 7th in searches on search.msn.com and 6th in Yahoo! – thanks to everyone who has linked to the site so far. If anyone else could link to the site using the word Beamish as the link (i.e. Beamish) I would be delighted – do it in a blog or a site link – either works.