Welcome to Ireland’s ugly urban sprawl
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True, it can be seen as insulting, but you can’t deny the place is being swallowed up in housing estates and retail parks. there’s no big plan and the place is turning into a suburban wasteland. As said in the article you’d think we’d learn from the mistakes made in the UK but we just follow along.
@Mob79 wrote:
True, it can be seen as insulting, but you can’t deny the place is being swallowed up in housing estates and retail parks. there’s no big plan and the place is turning into a suburban wasteland. As said in the article you’d think we’d learn from the mistakes made in the UK but we just follow along.
I think there are three Schools of thought in play here, those who read the hype of the article and have written its authors off as the looney left without examining the facts they had assembled. And with that writing style it wasn’t too difficult to do.
The second school of thought has looked at the facts and not really considered the prose style which is quite frankly terrible and destroys a good piece of research.
Mob79 has hit it for me, there is no grand plan like there is in most developed nations, the three major points that are made are correct. Firstly you can expect that same chance of a planning permission for a one off house whether it has been designed by DeBlacham & Maher into context or whether you have downloaded one the of ‘Irish House Design’ packages and had an engineer sign it off.
Secondly the M3 cutting through the SKreen Valley close to the Hill of Tara an archaelogical area of World significance, there are two points on this firstly the EIS flagged another possible route on the other side of the Hill of Skreen which would have had significantly less impact. The cost benefit analysis of the M3 in relation to other transport projects is also highly questionable, the M3 does not serve any major population centres, but will in reality service hundreds of acres of low density sprawl along its route.
Thirdly the Carrickmines fiasco, the reality about carrickmines is simple, an important national monument was leveled not because it was obstructing a Motorway but because the DOE refused to move a roundabout by 400 metres, this roundabout was not moved because its present position suited the entrance of Dublins biggest retail warehousing park.
To dismiss all of these points as not true and not relevant would be an error and to present them in style adopted was also a mistake. Ireland needs to start adopting some real central planning and stop granting ad-hoc planning decisions to low density development of poor design quality.
This article is a load of Blarney, basically anything outside of Dublin is a farm, endless countryside, I mean it just goes on and on and on……where else could one hide shiploads of illegal arms without being detected.
The one-off bungalows are just in keeping with the low standard of house design in Ireland as a whole over the last 40 years.
As for the motorway debacle, I hope it’s finished soon because I have to say it’s the most beautiful stretch of road I’ve ever had the pleasure to drive on.
Id agree with the previous post, anything outside of Dublin is a farm! Its insane the picture they are trying to paint of Ireland. I would agree with the motorway programme, the building ok IKEA ect..
Stira Youre a muppet as per Liffey Valley highrise in fact I have my suspisiosions onto your normal profile,
Shaun ur rant is well known,
Three points to be adressed
I would welome some constructive demolition
What im saying is Diaspora, once you get outside of Dublin there is almost nothing except countryside. I think the picture the article tries to portray is a very different and almost sensationolist one as opposed to the one that exists.
Possibly the two stupidest posts i’ve ever seen stira and shaun. Did you read the article from the irish times shown here a few weeks ago regarding the shock induced from the extent of suburban sprawl in rural ireland seen from satellite images. Or sorry, is the Irish times a D4 mouthpiece to.
Villages are being swallowed up in duplicate red brick/ mock tudor/georgian blah blah housing estates that strangle any further development of the actual village, souless retail parks popping up on every roundabout on the new bypass, bye bye town centre, hello BnQ, toy city, homebase, M&S, Sterile business parks 2 miles out of town, lets get the cars out, or maybe we could build a bungalow nearer to work, maybe they’ll build a housing estate out by the business park, mock tudor maybe, that’ll fit in. We can drive the kids to school, they’ll have to upgrade this road soon anyway.
Progress hurray, spread out the blanket of Service stations, warehouses, new roundabouts, maybe a “3-storey” apartment block with ample parking, hotels, travel taverns, out of town shopping centre…………………………
………………………………………..etc etc etc etc.
The place is being churned up, Last time i went home from westport to sligo i couldn’t help but notice the hedgerows were grey from the constant muck churning of passing lorries loaded with the spoils of another fantastic new out of town development.
I’m all for progress, but at it’s been left it in the hands of clueless tasteless fools who couldn’t give a shite about anything but there own return, sly deals and more money for the boys, throw up anything anywhere, to hell with the consequences.but this happens everywhere Mob79 in every country in Northern Europe, well maybe not in Finland.
The people who complain about out of town shopping centres ruining our towns are often the same ones that fill up the car boot on a saturday afternoon and go home to their new mock georgian house with carparking and drive the kids to school in the 4×4 with bull bars.
Developers are’nt daft….the give the punters what they want..And for what it’s worth I also think stira’s last point about Ireland outside Dublin is a good one.
@alan d wrote:
Developers are’nt daft….the give the punters what they want.
You make it very hard to reply to that without sounding like a snob but i don’t think what joe punter wants is whats best in the long run and he most likely doesn’t know the alternative. There are alternatives so why should we accept those without any vision or imagination be let create our environment. (i’m not expecting a detailed answer on why.)
Also on your point of its what happens everywhere else, it happened everywhere else, leessons were learned, but no, we’ll go ahead and see how it works out ourselves thanks.
Stiras last point,…. to quote someone elses take on De Veleras dream of “a chicken in every pot”, well now its “a house in every field”.I think the arguement used by an taisce and the other conservationists that Ireland is on the road to ruin is a bit like Bush and Blair punting their terrorist around every corner message.
It serves their purpose………… to make it worse than it is.
@Mob79 wrote:
You make it very hard to reply to that without sounding like a snob but i don’t think what joe punter wants is whats best in the long run and he most likely doesn’t know the alternative. There are alternatives so why should we accept those without any vision or imagination be let create our environment. (i’m not expecting a detailed answer on why.)
.why would a developer pay for something better when the same shit they have been doing and building cheaply will sell anyway. the profit margin decreases…doesn’t make economic sense. while i agree that they should be better it’s a simple matter of sums…
The article had it right. Planning in this country is a shambles. The path of development we are on signifies a crass, ignorant and selfish society with no ideals left to aspire to.
Recently I was on a flight over Germany and was (as always) fascinated at the landscape, with rural towns and villages composed of clusters of buildings and the surrounding fields almost entirely unbroken until the next town. Down on the ground the high quality local roads that run between villages do not have houses along them and are all the better for that. Driving is a pleasure, driving through beautiful farmland scenery unspoilt by mcmansion after mcmansion and the associated gates and entrances.
At night the roads are not all floodlight the way they are here as the cars have headlights on them and people use these to see the way. So even though a motorway may be not far away you can still see the night sky. Which is nice. Something that we don’t have anymore in the city of Dublin, but something you should be able to expect if you are in the countryside.
The German use of land just seems so much more intelligent – and of course this is not limited to Germany. I noticed the same thing flying over the Netherlands – and this an area that we learnt of in school as being nearly all one big “conurbation” (and I remember thinking as we learnt this that god the dutch ruined their country!)
On a slightly positive point I’ve also noted that Ireland when seen from the air is not a total write off and there are very large areas that can of course be seen as rural. This may be what stira has in mind when saying that outside of Dublin there is nothing but countryside. The problem that you will see however is that every road in Ireland is a ribbon of development on both sides. And anywhere there’s a view it is spoilt by one off housing or holiday ‘vilages’. The result is that as you travel through Ireland outside of Dublin you find it increasingly difficult to experience the countryside. All the places that are accessible have been spoilt (not developed – spoilt). This did not need to be so and we could have looked to other countrys for example and plan development towards what we want or at the very least avoided the many obvious mistakes.
FIN – developer may well be driven by profit, but the market is not the only factor he needs to consider – he needs to address the regulatory framework he operates in and the law of the land. The sums are indeed skewed towards building crap inthe wrong place. This is where planning fits in and is where we are being let down with permanent damage to our counrty.
@FIN wrote:
why would a developer pay for something better when the same shit they have been doing and building cheaply will sell anyway. the profit margin decreases…doesn’t make economic sense. while i agree that they should be better it’s a simple matter of sums…
Lets all lie down and die then and let some ignoramus build a car park over us.
While on the matter of sums could someone please explain to me why on the one hand you’ve got shoe box apartments built for investors to cram in money making human units, then on the other you’ve got low density housing estates completely underusing the land to its full potntial if its money they’re after.
Can no one with a brain see a middle ground. Are spacious 3-4 storey apartments with large balconies/outside areas/ roof gardens really that crazy a vision of what’s possible with a much larger return than a wasteful housing estate.
Boggles me.i’m not defending it, i am just stating a fact. if the law changes then fine but until then quit whinging about it and do something. an taisce are toothless in this regard, as they are viewed as interfereing busy bodies from jackland, who know nothing about ireland. we ” in the country” are a nation of small farms when at the time it was cheaper ( and still is) to build on ur family’s farm then buy either another site or a house in town,surburb or city. why would we want some gobshite telling us, no it’s better for us here in dublin ( and from the article, in england) to think of oirland as quaint and everyone surviving on patato’s and for our children when we go out on a sunday for a drive to see some farms from the car. f**k that. if u really want to stop this encroachment then increase the plot ratio within cities and build high rise.now rant over,
yes it is down to planning issues, but until these change then we are stuck with them.
and he’s off again…….
Having presribed body status and having 80 to 90 per cent of its appeals overturned makes An Taisce rather un-toothless. The thing is you would need about 50 An Taisces (or An T to be 50 times bigger) to combat the level of environmental degradation and bad development in Ireland (you would also need more enviromental awareness on the part of the government, developers & the general public)
The Guardian article was all too true, but it lost impact because it just went through the issues one after another – at the end you’re left thinking ‘who would want to do anything about all of that?’ Then again, you have to consider it was written for a UK audience – we are yused to being drip fed these issues by Treacy Hogan and Frank McD, so it may be a good thing for the Brits tio hear about it this way.
@FIN wrote:
why would we want some gobshite telling us, no it’s better for us here in dublin ( and from the article, in england) to think of oirland as quaint and everyone surviving on patato’s and for our children when we go out on a sunday for a drive to see some farms from the car.
yes it is down to planning issues, but until these change then we are stuck with them.The primary focus of the article was not whether homes could be built outside town boundaries. The primary focus was the Hill of Tara and an analysis of the Carrickmines fiasco, the article raised the point that basically anyone can build what they like where they like as the authorities at local level do little to enforce the regulations.
It is down to planning as you say Fin, and the point made is that planning appears to exist at development plan level, but the development plans are rarely implemented as written.
If people are in breach of the development plan and are refused permission by An Bord Pleanala they should ask their professional advisors why they were refused and address the reasons for refusal. To blame An Taisce gets nobody anywhere as they (An Taisce) would have no grounds for objection if the applications were complient.
The article was entirely unbalanced. It was the kind of paddy bashing that the Guardian specializes in, knowing that there is an “ah shure yea, yar honour constituency for it here” mostly in Dublin 4.
The articles points were ok ( although I disagree with the bromides against once off housing). However
1) It is not true that Dublin is an doughnut city ( with a hole) . It has a vibrant city center. Most people on this board will shop in that center this weekend , or before Christmas, and will probably socialize there every week before christmas.
2) it is low rise sprawling. So is London, for most of it’s inhabitants. and sprawls more. And has no real center where people go every weekend.
3) We are trying to build higher density in the center. Some of the people opposed to that are also opposed to sprawl. One wonders where they expect people to live.
4) We are infrastructurally deficient in motorways. It makes sense to build more, lest we get another paddywhackery article from the Guardian ( always the worst for that, by the way) about the State of Irish roads – which would have everybody here pulling the cloth cap about how “backward we are”. Yes we should spend more money on public transport, but we are playing catchup. All high population growth areas do.
5) The real imbalance was the lack of mention of the migration flow into Ireland. There is at least a positive net migration of 50K a year into Ireland – and I think that is too low. We are building 80,000 units a year and still prices rise, so real migration may be higher. The 50K a year is equal to half a million extra new migrants per year in London. It is hard to imagine an article on London’s sprawl which would not mention that, if that were the case.So it was horrendously unbalanced.
Ireland is underpopulated compared to the UK, or England. Our own population is not increasing that much, but immigration is increasing it. not mentioned.I grow tired of the “everywhere is better than Ireland” crap. Germany sprawls, for chrissakes, Dusseldorf used to be a fishing village. I am sure during Germanys population boom of the last century it had problems, and massive sprawl ( which seems incorrpurated into the Ruhr now” , and we know that London had massive problems in Dickens’ time, and later, during it’s major period of growth.
the article in the guardian was spot on in that it told the truth. I dont like british papers paddy bashing either but I still have the intelligence to recognise the truth when I see it, there is no point in saying it’s not true because it has been written by a british paper. Anyone who has travelled throughout Ireland over the last ten years especially can see that the architecture and planning are purely profit driven full stop, end off.
I didn’t deny that it told the truth, in some repects. I denied that it was balanced. It was typical Guardian, come to Ireland and talk to curmudgeons and get soundbites, adn return to England to give the Guardian “liberals” what they want to hear. The article would have been a bit more nuanced if it had mentioned the massive rise in inward migration, the obvious building sites in the centre of town, the new proposals for an Itnerconnector for Public transport from IE, the debate over high rise building. It presented a litany of woes without context, and with no regard to the actual debated going on, not least on these boards, and elsewhere.
In fact it would be fair to write the same article , with the same facts and start something like this: “Dulbin, a city which has traditionally sprawled, at least since the foundation of the Irish State – when slums were cleared and large suburbs created on the outskirts of town – continues to sprawl, but there is a genuine attempt to move people back to the city centre which is obvious in the large building projects in the Docklands area, which have any number of cranes. It looks llike London in the Eighties”
Seems he missed the cranes in the Grand Canal, and Spencer dock pre-development, the entire plan for the city centre, the new housing density regulations. And so on.
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