Welcome to Ireland’s ugly urban sprawl
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“Today’s reality is altogether different. If you want a tamed landscape dotted with off-the-shelf mock-Georgian houses, congested with nose-to-tail traffic and suffused by an ugly suburban sprawl, then céad mile fáilte – welcome to Ireland”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1364782,00.html
Can this be true?
Long article.. well researched … coming from a particular camp though.. good mix of figures and opinion. I think some people get hysterical however about keeping the landscape wild… it’s obvoius we need a good organisation at the helm of development work .. taking roads and housing industry etc.. under its wing… some hope at the moment anyway when the govt pays no attention to its spatial strategy with the decentalisation proccess.
Anyway… with compliance with EU pollution laws etc I don’t see why we can’t develop substantially taking care as we go… problem seems to be that the agenda of the “anti-current way of working” bodies seem to be a bit extreme… I don’t have a problem with Soutwarks (Dallas?) dotted around .. they’re quite funny… you get them a lot in Cavan.Its always good to have an outside opinion of whats happening here. It helps you keep things in prespective. An execllent article and all too true I think. Makes for very unsettling reading.
It was a little full on I thought, and it is generally better not to wash your dirty laundry in your most important tourist market. But they are in essence correct in the points they made, it was all avoidable.
I personally blame Martin Cullen for the whole sorry mess, it is worth remembering Cullens stance on e-voting, Bertie made two critical errors at the reshuffle he didn’t fire Cullen and he didn’t promote Liz O’Donnell at Tom Parlons expense, they (Cullen & Parlon) are both walking liabilities.
There are plenty more articles like this being written all over Europe and the States which will in time destroy our tourist industry as well as the environment, all the tax breaks in the World can’t make empty hotels profitable.
Maybe it is a little full on but then its coming to this with a fresh perspective whereas we can become immune to whats going on to a large degree because it is happening so much. Seems as if the article agrees with you as well Diaspora – Martin Cullen is the scourge of environmentalist in Ireland today.
Martin Cullen is the scourge of the taxpayer,
he keeps chucking buckets of money at schemes of questionable merit, go over to the M50 thread on http://www.platform11.org
807m for the M50 upgrade, this comes after wasting a million for every week of the year on e-voting.
So should we not have motorway / dual carriage way linking major urban centres ? it is the standard in all other european countries. I just drove back from Cork, It took 3 hours and ten minutes, the last time it took well over four … are we suggesting that a two lane road passing through several towns is an acceptable way to link the countries two largest cities ?
Sure roads aren’t the answer but to my mind motorway linking dublin with cork limerick galway & waterford is a standard that should be met …
Aside from faster journey times, from a safety view point, its essential … night time visibility is dreadful with on coming headlights in your face … there’s no mystery behind our road death figures … the two lane national raods are dreadful.
We absolutely should have a motorway linking Belfast with Cork via Dublin and another going to Cork, a spur off it going to Limerick and an upgrade of the the Route to Waterford.
But the 807m has nothing to do with the routes connecting our major centres. This project had an estimate of 316m 15 months ago according to platform11’s website apparently from the Sunday Business Post.
What I want to know is why a project cost can go from 316m to 807m in 15 months? Something is seriously wrong with that.
So there was a route around the Hill of Tara after all. You really do get numbed living in this country, really you do
Very disturbing article – it’s certainly true the truth really hurts. We’re literally on the ROAD to nowhere. 2020 what a vision / vista awaits us and is taking place all around us due to no vision and greed in abundance. Posterity is bound to ask (as we do now) who shaped our landscape and what was going on in Leinster House and the schools of architecture and planning !!
what is the acceptable loss for the advancment of our country? the reality is not the oh” this is bad, and that is bad so we shouldn’t do it, what does the country need.i would however never support anything that destroys tara, but as i believe it doesn’t go through the hill but 3 miles away or something. i could be wrong however. the article is a good one and points out some interesting things but we are not a little isolated island anymore who’s reliance on toursim is overwhelming everyother aspect. we need these roads and it’s as simple as that, and to be honest, no-one can tell us what to do with our own country.
The M50 was designed as a by-pass of Dublin, but it has turned into something completely different.
I agree that some of the junctions need to be upgraded as they were badly and cheaply designed. I remember about a month after the M50 first opened, there was people pointing out that the Red Cow Jtn was badly designed. The Government at the time said that it would cost £4million to fix. So of course they did nothing. But later when traffic increased they installed a quick fix of traffic lights on roundabouts, which leads to the mess we see today.The biggest fault with the M50 is it does absolutely nothing to get commuters to the heart of the city without having major congestion. Now rail on the other had has proven itself time after time to be a superior form of transportation for getting commuters in and out of a cities heart.
If the government put the same investment into rail as they do with roads, well to put it simply, half the roads projects would not be needed like the widening of the M50 and the Naas Road or even the proposed M3.
An embarrassing article, very comprehensive. All true and lots of it quite disturbing.
Saying that, reading it one would get the impression Ireland is a brash, crass, mini-America, across the board.
We’re not that bad by a long shot, but certainly in certain areas we’re well on our way if not there already.We have to get a grip on planning in this country, our core problem.
When I was a kid in the 1970’s and 80’s I can recall loads of overseas media portraits of Ireland as a backward, church-run, myopic land where modern civil liberties taken for granted in other Western democracies such as divorce, contraception, etc were banned, while women’s equality was archaic and gay’s right were unthinkable. At the time, Ireland was divided between one section of the society who were embarrassed to be living in this country and agreed with this negative portrayal of us, and the other half who claimed there was nothing wrong with Ireland and this was just anti-Irish bigotry and nothing else.
I think in 21st Century the likes of this excellent and accurate article are present day equivalent of the “Land of Gombeenmen and Priests” of the 1970’s and 80’s. We need to be shamed and embarrassed on this island for the mess we are in. Hopefully enough Irish people will be embarrassed by the state of “planning” and development in this country they will change the culture. This sadly is the only way to get most things done in this country. I welcome such brutally frank portrayal of the mess this country is in as we need this mirror held up to eventually expose the culprits and shake the apathetic masses out of their slumber.
There was nothing in the Guardian article I would consider over the top – we need to be told what a joke we are by outsiders. And we are most certainly are a joke. The Celtic Tiger has resulted in a “Trailer Trash Wins the Lotto” mentality among our politicians. We are blowing money on expensive showcasing rather than what we actually require.
I read once that a survey carried out by a student at Waterford NIT discovered that Waterford City has the lowest public transport usage of any city in Europe and less that most US cities – roughly 1% use the bus. Tonight Waterford Council outlined a plan for a new town of 12,000 people based entirely on a new ring road as the only transport access. Some fear Minister Cullen has now taken his local transport “success†onto the National Stage and we should be very concerned about this development – in effect putting him in charge of motorways is like letting a junkie loose in a pharmacy. We need articles like this if he is to change his ways via international criticism and embarrassment.
@P11 Comms wrote:
Tonight Waterford Council outlined a plan for a new town of 12,000 people based entirely on a new ring road as the only transport access.
To be fair to the council, I’m not sure that there is any rail in the city boundaries: I think it’s all just North of the river in Kilkenny. The planned town is to be fairly high density, allowing for most local journeys to be completed on foot. As regards public transport, they just need a good link into Waterford city. Maybe the council could reserve some of the land going into the city for a right-of-way bus corridor to be upgraded to LRT once the demand is there.
As for the article, I guess that sprawl has been the result of well intentioned but mistaken planning policy rather than anything else. Presumably developers would have been happy to continue building additions to old towns at the existing densities, had it not been for 4-to-the acre planning rules.
Sprawl puts a massive gulf between the city residents and the countryside. Bring back walled towns! City or country and nothing in between- certainly not 8 miles of ulta boredom.
Oh my god – I am only 25 and I do remember the M50 being built as a by-pass around Dublin – its effectively Dublin’s new circular road, with everything within could be called the new Inner City!!!!!
That article is more akin to something you would see on Indymedia than in a proper newspaper. It’s more a polemic than it is a report. He talks about windfarms as some kind of panacea for all our problems yet it is conservationists who have opposed most of the wind farm plans. A lot of the points he makes are accurate, I just think the tone is a little rash.
Also, just on a point of interest regarding the M50 – the original plan for the junction at the Red Cow was for a single-level signal-controlled roundabout. It was only after a lot of lobbying that this was changed to a grade-separated junction.
When in reality what we needed all along was three-level junctions at all the major intersections of the M50. I read on Platform 11 that only the junctions between the Airport and the Red Cow should be made into spaghetti junctions.
But thas is exactly the thought process that will leave Tallaght, Dundrum and Sandyford gridlocked in years to come.
Saying that the redeveloped M50 won’t meet capacity, so therefore we should just leave it alone, is just moronic.I am genuinly amazed at the response to this article, only Fin and now kefu have questioned it’s validity, it seems to me.
It’s like a depressive illness somehow and I recognise it because it is similar to Scotland and how we here view ourselves in relation to the rest of the world. Don’t accept the polemic , sure some of it may have a relevance but not all.
We’ve started though to climb out of the hole and our contemporary architecture is not as good as yours…yet.
Kefu is right – this isn’t journalism, it’s a rant. One example from many possible – Toyota in Tralee isn’t just selling cars, it’s “doing its bit to inflate the car economy”. Imagine coming to Ireland and depending on Ian Lumley, Eamonn Ryan and Tony Lowes to tell you what’s happening? It’s like going to Britain and speaking to Screaming Lord Sutch, Arthur Scargill and Billy Bragg.
A lot of these liberal Brits want Ireland to stay a backward “pleasant” country where they can shoot and fish during the summer. We’re not allowed to have roads, Tralee isn’t to have Toyotas, and bogs are to be left alone and just looked at. What a lot of twaddle. Amazed that a serious newspaper could publish such a one-sided view. 😡
Very well said Sue
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