The Skehan/Sirr plan
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I just hate to see what seems like a keen intellect wasted in launching lame ad hominems.
Besides its been so long since I occupied the moral high ground, even fleetingly, I wanted to recapture the experience – LOL!
Revert when you’ve time and we might traverse the concept of how the former administration might have intended to enforce/administer a National Plan for either economics or spatial development without someone in charge… or a civil service willing to relocate…
Until then.
ONQ.
The National Spatial Strategy was laudable, but political interference led to it being diluted and (to use a favourite Skehan phrase) ‘the jam being spread too thin’. However to really see the lack of political will to develop a co-ordinated strategy for the future development of the country – take the NSS map and overlay it with the decentralisation locations proposed – its both funny and depressing to see how plan-led development is considered in this country.
True, but I think we’re in a sticky mess whether you scrape all the jam onto one side or not.
I suspect that, in line with the times that were in it back in 2007, the authors of the National Spatial Strategy imagined that jam wouldn’t be a problem, but even allowing for that slight miscalculation, the whole thing should have been handed back to them at the press conference once it emerged that one of the four new national urban ‘Gateways’ was actually triangulated to a bog somewhere equidistant from the modest market towns of Mullingar, Tullymore and Athlone.
I don’t think the national spatial strategy was properly conceived at all.
At best it was aspirational beyond its means or ability.
Suggesting that people would decentralize without first having manged this changed through the appropriate channels was incompetent.
Basing the national spatial strategy – in principle – on reversing the flight from the land to the cities – a world wide phenomenon in developed and developing countries – was simply absurd.Skehan Sir at least have the matter in clear focus.
Dublin’s Future
Chapter 14 is entitled ‘The Future of the Past’, by Gillian O’Brien, a historian out of Dublin City University who, the biographical notes explain, is currently doing some retro CSI on the murder of Dr. Patrick Cronin, which will shortly all be explained in a book entitled; ‘The Murder of Dr. Patrick Cronin’.
Oddly for a contribution entitled; ‘The Future of the Past’, in a book entitled; ‘Dublin’s Future’, the ‘future’ and the contribution that the legacy of the ‘past’ could make to enhancing that future, doesn’t particularly feature in this piece.
What does feature in this peace is the information that Dublin was once ‘the second city of the British Empire’, O’Brien seems so impressed with this, oft repeated and very fleeting, historical nugget that she repeats it herself three times in seven pages, but to what purpose is unclear. Maybe the message is that if we all pull up our socks we can be back up there with Birmingham or Calcutta or whoever the current imperial [commonwealth family of equals] runner-up badge holder may be.
Sticking with the theme of lost colonial status, the chapter continues with some musings on Dublin street names, both the colonial ones and the descriptive ones, but again it’s just the usual suspects, Winetavern Street and Fishamble Street etc. with their abundantly obvious derivations, there’s no new research throwing light on the sedentary origins of Lazy Hill or making the tantalizing connection between Crooked Staff and dodgy 17th century employment agencies.
Moving on, the piece lingers a while on the topic of commemoration, pointing out that ‘A Plethora of centenary commemorations will shortly be upon us’, which O’Brien then lists out – from the 1913 Lock-out to the Civil War in 1922. Clearly these forthcoming commemorations are going to present a challenge with the potential for the re-opening of old wounds.
I dunno, in the circumstances with money being tight and all that and with us having enough problems on our plate already, maybe we should just shelve all these problematic 20th century commemorations, with their sensitivity issues, and just go for a full blooded re-enactment of Clontarf out on Dollymount Strand in 2014, something we can all get behind. Those little feckers with their plastic helmet horns have had it coming for years now with there unprovoked roaring at unsuspecting civilians from the safety of their amphibious landing craft, it’s long past time we gave them a dose of Irish Christianity, Christian Brothers style.
In other issues, O’Brien recounts the G.P.O. / Abbey Theatre proposed nest hoping episode of a couple of years back, before finally rolling up her sleeves and having a right dig at the Jimmy Deenihan and his – Dublin-Smithsonian-in-the-Old-Parliament-House-rural-TD-light-bulb-moment.
Quote: ‘to take the former Parliament Building and transform it into a literary centre and a museum dedicated to the 1916 Rising and call it the ‘O’Connell Centre fot the Arts’ makes as much sense as taking the Tower of London and transforming it into the ‘Alfred the Great Centre for the Study of Dickens and Cromwell’.
Ok, she gets points for that.
The chapter concludes with a reprise of the more prominent planning sagas in our troubled planning history, Fitzwilliam Street, Hume Street, Wood Quay, before finishing on the somewhat intangible themes of ‘The City of the Imagination’ and, ‘More than one truth’.
In slipping away from the challenge of drawing actual concrete conclusions, use is made of an Eileen Battersby, Irish Times, opinion piece, quote from 2010, . . . ‘most cities are built of stone and brick, but Dublin . . . is firmly planted on a bedrock of words’.
And there it is, the aul sod syndrome reinvented for the 21st century. Don’t worry about our civic realm deficit, our slide down the urban scale, our neglect of built-heritage, sure our culture is literary, our gifts are of the mind . . . . stone and brick cities are for saps.
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