Re: Re: O’ Connell Street

In fairness to the O’Connell St planners they never sanctioned a 10 storey building like the Dun Laoghaire plan envisages for what are both sensitive locations. I agree with Graham that it is unfair to point to tree-huggers given that the section of the Street with the trees hasn’t even been touched and that the remainder of the Street without trees has taken the best part of a decade to partially complete.

I think that we are getting a lot closer to the source of the problem when one considers a comparison with some of the great Parisian boulevards and the unified design of these and the lack of cohesion in the O’Connell St proposal. It is an obvious reality that space is at an absolute premium in O’Connell St and that the designers had a very simple choice on how to use that space, my problem is that I feel that in some sections too much space was used widening the side pavements and not enough on the central median.

The meagre allocation has been further compounded by the inappropriate siting of non-essential items such as the bicycle parking and a luas transformer. Mistakes that could have been avoided with just a little thought and a little co-ordination.

You can blame incidents like objections to the Spire and the delays to the Carlton project for a certain amount of delay in very specific sections of the Street but these excuses can only be relied upon for a very small proportion of the problem.