The failure of Ireland
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Social structures are very similar as are the resultant attitudes.
The diffrence between the two are that progressive local authorities like Westminster and The City have more influence over government than vice versa. Hence the better built environment.
Berlin is probably a better example as the germans are more technical generally and municipal authorities are permitted to take on larger debt burdens.
Base line you can build literally anything in Ireland once its low enough
Its probrably also that we have had poor government by any standards. The stench of corruption is literally all over West Dublin. Ironically the parties in government are the very ones I tought were most progressive. Its disappointing to see so much missed opportunity. What has happened to the metro now even:confused:
Darkman you sound like your world has fallen asunder.
Metro north is out for Procurement, results of which are scheduled for this summer.
Agreed that projects in Ireland take a long time, everything is consensus based, a reflection of the main party in power.Metro North should be the Middle of the three proposed underground lines.
DoT are the only ones out of step with the general consensus on that!
Where is the damn interconnector?
Reason for edit: Thought you meant Metro West – Which given the Minister for Transport in question could equally have been chosen First 😮
Alarms bells go off in my head when I think of the current transport system or even the proposed Transport (21)plan.
Yes, we have achieved a lot: Foreign Investment/Highly Skilled-Educated Workforce/Low Unemployment the list goes on but Darkman makes some serious points that hit home to a lot of people I have talked to. How long do you think we can remain competitive with the current infrastructure in place and attract a highly skilled workforce from other nations or foreign investment (that appears to be moving eastwards).The old argument that we are not used to having money or, we are small country don’t really wash with me for three reasons:
• Watch Eastern European countries getting there act together (with harsh and brutal history that compete with ours)
• We have screwed up so many small projects in the past (Port Tunnel), we all know damn well that any future projects will be fraught with schedule/budget overruns (and we will accept that)Solution: I feel projects like this should be assigned to the Japanese or German Transport Planners and people made accountable for delays and spirally costs. Contractors in Germany for instance would never be allowed get away with a Port Tunnel type fiasco.
Someone said once, what do you have to show for 10-15 years economic growth: a spike in the middle and a slow train set that does not even connect in the middle that no one asked for’ … jokes aside, this comment isn’t really too far fetched for my ears.
The Port tunnel was the largest infrastructural project ever undertaken in this state, its construction was far from fiasco but was marred with the usual media mud slinging loaded with inaccuracies. The project was NOT over budget.
Reasonably objective appraisal here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_port_tunnelGregF wrote:Dublin is no comparison to Venice, which has a far more exhuberant historical building stock. Bar Amsterdam, which has it’s canals, as a Joe Soap, what do you think of when you think of Stockholm or Copenhagen]I only compared the scale of Venice to Dublin in the context of this thread. Please odnt misrepresent me.
I think it’s funny that the people who have been complaining about the failure of Ireland, claiming that it’s the nations fault for not thinking big, for not building big and for generally having a superiority complex (while somehow at the same time having an inferiority complex) are the very people who have the most negative attitudes.
There has been a phenomenal amount of money wasted in the last decade by the government and there has been a lot of corruption and dubious development. This is not the fault of the population or the institution of government. Ireland has changed immensely in the last 15 years. If you wish to guage change purely on the basis of what infrastructural projects have been completed and when, they you’re always going to be disappointed. Not because Ireland cannot bring such projects to completion, but because they are a slow process. Rome wasn’t built in a day. The real and positive changes made in the working environment, in employment in general, in science and engineering, R&D and so on, these are the areas where progress is much less obvious, yet crucially important.Anyone who thinks that Dublin should be the most important city in Europe is really living in a fantasy land. It’s great to aspire to be the best, but it’s important to have a realistic vision for Ireland. We are a small country, with a small population. We’ve achieved great things and we will go on to do so, but don’t for a moment become so arrogant as to think that we are the be all and end all. Humility is part of the reason Irish businesses have been so successful abroad.
darkman,
are you living in the same country as me? This is ireland everything is done small here and wrongly too. Its the attitude the entire country has and will always have a small minded one about change under any circumstances its a very conservative country in many regards. I mean comon look at our military even we don’t even have jet fighters to protect our country because we think ahhh sure someone else will do it for us.
Its the same kind of lazy attitude that has the politicians coming around to the door every year to ask you to vote for them so they can get their yearly wage, they don’t actually care about you and aren’t gonna do anything they claim they will except come back next year when they want their wages again.
Thats the way this country is and that translates even into the construction industry in ireland. So its no wonder we don’t have highrises in this country people are small minded self obsessed and usually only do things 20 to 30 years after the rest of the world has done it.
Simple as that..
What an extraordinarily negative attitude.
I’d love to round up the small group of (I suspect) very young moaners and high-rise fetishists on these pages and send them back in a time machine to 1987. Our genertaion has dragged this country and this city out of the shite and and made it world-class in a very short space of time and we should be proud of it. Yes, the planning system is very slow, and it’s still a work in progress in a lot of areas, notably transport infrastructure. But nearly everything is improving. Show me a perfect country anyway.
We used to be great at beating ourselves up, some people obviously still are. They really should emigrate because most Irish people have had enough of that crap.2 questions re darkman’s original post
The biggest turn-off for me about living in Ireland (speaking as someone who doesn’t but is about to) is the complete obsession with the place. What generates the mindset of constant self-examination, introspection and comparison with other nations? It’s all very early 20th century. In an incredibly globalised world we are – whether we care or not – completely linked to the rest of the world, and the decisions we make have impacts far beyond comfy national boundaries. Surely decisions we make should be weighed up globally, in an international context? Surely we should make decisions about what type of cities to build based on what the best thing to do is, rather than based on ideas of a very localised national pride? Why does all of this discussion have to focus on Ireland? If we put things in a broader international context we might conclude that building a load of high rises in a medium sized historical European city for no apparent economic reason might not be appropriate (and worse might be no more than the architectural equivalent of pouring money into a big fancy f***-off SUV)?
The second, coming out of the first, is what your criteria for ‘failure’ and success might be? Is it a success if Dublin get s a slew of great iconic high rises designed by internationally acclaimed architects if the carbon emissions contribute to climate change which, for example, might displace communities in poorer countries on the front line of sea level rise? I find it very constraining to limit thinking to a localised view.
Why should be building in order to keep up with the rest of the industrialised west?
We know that the richer countries (of which Ireland is now one) are selfishly splurging resources in a spectacularly wasteful manner which is starting to have impacts we can now see looming in the near future. On all the graphs I see of carbon emissions, temperature rise, declining biodiversity or fish stocks etc. the eighties appear as a now unattainable nirvana of lower environmental impact compared to now. What is the point of advocating accelerated local building? Surely we have better stuff to do? In the words of the American environmental author Edward Abbey “growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell”.
If I seem to be ranting about the environment it’s not because I am a green activist, it’s because I work in the field of urban design and environmental issues increasingly affect almost every aspect of every decison we have to make. I’ve been listening to this year’s BBC Reith lectures by the American economist Jeffrey Sachs which really put things in a global context. The outlook sounds a bit scary but he really outlines the ways that policy and investment need to go to start doing something to turn the situation around:
‘this genertaion has dragged this country and this city out of the shite and and made it world-class in a very short space of time and we should be proud of it’
ahh no its called low corporation tax and education policies put in place in the 1970’s. Watch ireland fall apart when the mutlinationals move out and the building industry slows down which is the main economic factor behind growth in ireland.
Also whats so world class about ireland? Of course every nationality thinks his country is worldclass but lets be honest ireland is far from world class in terms of infrastructure. Ireland doesn’t have indegenious industrys that make it world class apart from guinness….
If you look at a country like sweden norway or switzerland comparing similar size countries in europe they are miles ahead. Sweden owns saab and motorola and builds its own stealth submarines and military griffen fighter planes..
I don’t believe this.
Why is building stealth submarines good? Would you be happy if we were like the US, spending more on defence than the rest of the world combined (not to mention spending $275 million a day on a catastrophically mismanaged, probably illegal war)? Now there’s impressive spending. They must be winners.
Why compare with other countries? What constitutes success?
Having a country people actually want to live in is a start… this wasn’t the case till recently.
Education policies didn’t create the boom – sure weren’t we educating people for export for most of the 20th century?I believe the last decade has been about quantity over quality, especially in the housing market. However we have proved there’s more to this country than Glenroe, Eurovision, and Guinness. It’s a start, but the infrastructural deficit has the potential to cripple us. We have been governed atrociously by FFPD whereby economy always outweighed society. A bit more vision, especially at the local level would be nice.
I fully agree, but do we decide what to build because we want to be as ‘successful’ as our neighbours or because we want to do the right thing?
Taking the number of tall buildings or roads or jet fighters as an indicator of success sounds ludicrous to me. We are not going to dig our way out of the environmental hole Europe is in just by building more. The problem with the M50 is not the road, it’s the record levels of car use. The problem with the port tunnel is not it’s height, it’s that a powerful transport industry is using more and bigger vehicles instead of more sustainable alternatives. We need better ideas than bigger tunnels. It reminds me of the Henry Ford quote about inventing the mass produced car – “if I had asked my customers what they wanted they’d have said a faster horse”.
We have to think creatively and think outside national boundaries. Obsessing endlessly about ourslves in relation to other countries is an irrelevance which gets in the way and smacks of small country syndrome. And put in the context of issues in say India (with a population of 100 million plus), it really is kind of irrelevant to the global situation. Nobody else cares. All that verbage could be put to better use focussing on problem solving. We need good ideas and good designs and it doesn’t matter if they are Irish or not. This isn’t school – there may be missed opportunities but that doesn’t mean we have failed, it means we have to work harder. Don’t focus on whether we have as many roads as France, focus on what we can do to improve the planet and help the 90% or so of the earth’s population who have nothing anywhere near the lifestyle we do.
I don’t believe this.
Why is building stealth submarines good? Would you be happy if we were like the US, spending more on defence than the rest of the world combined (not to mention spending $275 million a day on a catastrophically mismanaged, probably illegal war)? Now there’s impressive spending. They must be winners.
Why compare with other countries? What constitutes success?
Lol funny that darkman was pointing out the failure to think big about things. I think its intringed in the irish mentality as evidenced by your awnser. Why bother having a military then ? in fact lets not bother having the police either sure who needs them eh? why indeed when we can get others to defend our country thats it theyll come to our rescue…..
Its this mentality that has our armed services in a state where they are the biggest joke of europe. And people like you then claim sure the money would be better spent on the homeless or big grand wastes of money like the dublin port tunnel. Yeah…i think that was darkman’s point all along….small mindedness of irish will never change.
thinking in small terms is limiting to any country. Ireland always thinks small about things is inward looking and a conservative place. Sure we have great economic growth but it’s all a facade. Whats it based on nothing more then foreign investment and a building industry which feeds off that and shoody planning practices and a corrupt governement.
We are obsessed by money and wealth now and we haven’t done anything of note during our so called economic granduer which is mainly driven by the usa. I think thats what darkman feels aggrieved by and i agree with him.
The point im making is that this is born of a mentality of small mindnesses and lack of will to change and be brave about things but as long as people’s pockets are being lined in this country and johnny mcintee is happy with his lot in life and his drinking session on a friday night all is well in….
So
I think we are actually agreeing, we are just talking at cross-purpose.
I am not against any particular kind of spending. Military is OK – whatever turns you on. I have a problem with making decisions based on a complete obsession with how Ireland is seen abroad and an erroneous assumption about other countries automatically being better. If you are so interested in other countries, I guarantee you that discussion about major decisions in say Sweden does not centre on trying to be like everyone else, it is focussed on what is the best thing to do regardless of everyone else.
Their national strategy for oil independence by 2020 is an example. Something they managed to think up all by themselves, considering the global strategic situation and then deciding to do it:
http://www.sweden.gov.se/content/1/c6/06/70/96/7f04f437.pdf
Of course our own policy thinking is following along, as ever based on a good idea someone else had:
Knowing the bit I know about Sweden, I’m certain that the discussion didn’t centre on how great other countries are, but on what they needed to do that other countries aren’t doing.
It’s this obsession with “Ireland-Ireland-Ireland-yadda-yadda-yadda-why-can’t-we-be-like-Germany/UK/Sweden/whoever-moan-moan†that gets me down. It’s time we grew up, got over it and got the job done. Time’s a-wasting.
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