Welcome to Ireland’s ugly urban sprawl

Just as a by the way. Here’s an extract from the biography of Mark Lynas (http://www.marklynas.org), the guy who wrote the article: ‘He was also active in the flourishing environmental direct action scene during the late 1990s, joining road protests and helping mount “decontamination” exercises against genetically-modified crops, as well as participating in Reclaim the Streets protests in London and Oxford.’
And a few select points from this campaigner’s – not journalist’s – so-called report: ‘A rising star in the Irish cabinet, [Martin] Cullen seemed to delight in his defeat of the conservationists.’ – shows a fairly basic lack of knowledge of matters as diverse as e-voting and Monica Leech Public Relations.
He writes: ‘The government’s solution is to add an extra lane to the M50 orbital motorway and upgrade its junctions to remove traffic lights. The famous Red Cow roundabout will become a mass of concrete flyovers.’ – implies that the Red Cow roundabout is famous for a good reason and that a flyover will somehow be damaging to the environment.
He writes: ‘Ireland is one of the most car-dependent countries in the world. Irish motorists drive on average 24,000km a year, far above the UK’s average of 16,000 and even topping the US’s 19,000.’ He uses this little-used statistic because car ownership rates are still low by international standards and it doesn’t suit his argument.
He writes: ‘The numbers of people commuting by car to Dublin in the morning rush hour increased by 149% between 1991 and 2001.’ But since then – the numbers of cars entering the inner ring has actually fallen.
He writes: ‘Ian Lumley, knows he is losing the battle over Ireland’s future. “You have to look at this as an American country,” – What does that even mean?
He writes: ‘Giving Dublin the classic US-style “doughnut” shape’ – this has already been sufficiently debunked.
He writes: ‘A huge McMansion there with big Georgian pillars, huge flying buttresses and greenhouses.’ – Has anybody ever seen a house in Ireland with flying buttresses because I haven’t.
He writes: ‘A Tesco is opening next door, “bringing better quality shopping and more jobs to your area”. On the far side of the road an Aldi superstore is nearly complete, and a Toyota showroom is doing its bit to inflate the car economy.’ – This is just contemptible nonsense.
As Ian Lumley puts it: “The Irish mentality is inherently antiregulation and anti-officialdom. One of the theories is that this goes back to British occupation, to dodging the constabulary, dodging the revenue, getting away from the landlord, hiding pigs under the bed, hiding chickens in the roof and so on.” – this is just hackneyed embarrassing shite.
He writes: ‘Having recently visited Stonehenge, Clancy says she was “appalled” by how close the road runs to it.’ – the road at Stonehenge runs within fifty metres of the monument. The new M3 and I’m not defending it is 2400 metres away.
He writes: ‘[Martin] Cullen left his job at arts, heritage and environment not to spend more time with his family, but to spend more time with his beloved roads – as minister for transport.’ – shows more astonishing understanding of the Irish political system and ministerial appointments.

@Papworth wrote:

He writes: ‘Ireland is one of the most car-dependent countries in the world. Irish motorists drive on average 24,000km a year, far above the UK’s average of 16,000 and even topping the US’s 19,000.’ He uses this little-used statistic because car ownership rates are still low by international standards and it doesn’t suit his argument.

Ireland is a car dependent society because there is little public transport on offer in comparison to the European model.

@Papworth wrote:

He writes: ‘The numbers of people commuting by car to Dublin in the morning rush hour increased by 149% between 1991 and 2001.’ But since then – the numbers of cars entering the inner ring has actually fallen.

I’d be interested to see the source of this quote

@Papworth wrote:

He writes: ‘Ian Lumley, knows he is losing the battle over Ireland’s future. “You have to look at this as an American country,” – What does that even mean?

It means that unlike most European economies this one is being developed on a model that is not really that sustainable or doesn’t yield a great quality of life for its army of commuters.

@Papworth wrote:

As Ian Lumley puts it: “The Irish mentality is inherently antiregulation and anti-officialdom. One of the theories is that this goes back to British occupation, to dodging the constabulary, dodging the revenue, getting away from the landlord, hiding pigs under the bed, hiding chickens in the roof and so on.” – this is just hackneyed embarrassing shite.

I disagree, there is a culture in many parts of this Country that regards those that seek planning enforcement as ‘rats or grasses’ with a sense that an individual has broken the community by reporting unauthorised development to the ‘outside authorities’.

@Papworth wrote:

He writes: ‘Having recently visited Stonehenge, Clancy says she was “appalled” by how close the road runs to it.’ – the road at Stonehenge runs within fifty metres of the monument. The new M3 and I’m not defending it is 2400 metres away.

So if your not defending it why do you object to those that do complaining about it?

@Papworth wrote:

He writes: ‘[Martin] Cullen left his job at arts, heritage and environment not to spend more time with his family, but to spend more time with his beloved roads – as minister for transport.’ – shows more astonishing understanding of the Irish political system and ministerial appointments.

In fairness Martin Cullen is a disgrace, from e-voting to Carrickmines to the latest story running in the Independent, he has no regard to anyone but instead steamrolls everything through. The latest spend of €120k by the NRA on publishing advertising to attempt to distract attention from its own misdeeds is beyond belief.

The NRA executive should be replaced by a new team that is capable of delivering projects in a manner that doesn’t end up with most projects coming in significantly over budget and others years late because they didn’t sidestep the ‘professional road objectors’.

Cullen should be stripped of his ministerial seal for mismanagement of the public finances,

Kefu,

It is difficult to argue with what you are saying on the lack of enforcement as being the problem, speaking personnaly I do believe that a certain ‘Cumman’ mentality prevails in this regard, this cumman mentality has much of its origin in expelling the brit.

Regarding Cullen it is the PR adviser I was referring to and that one looks set to run for a while I think.

Regarding the style of Journalism these guys certainly did themselves no favours and have definitely acheived a lot less with it than if they had stuck to the impressive list of facts they assembled.

It was a little known fact that it would have cost 10m more to protect the Skreen Valley or about 3% of the overall cost, but I suppose down at NRA they probably reckoned that as projects such as the M50 were going up from c300m to c800m they’d better keep costs down. Regardless of the cost to heritage.

Diasporas prediction: Professional road objectors will add 50m to the cost of this project, will eventually lose and 40 important archaeological sites will be destroyed, the road will be delivered in 2009.

@kefu wrote:

Tara, which symbolically puts the other two in the shade, will be a long fight and the anti-campaign have already rallied an incredible selection of experts, conservationists, archaeologists, historians for a necessary road, but one that really won’t have the impact that GOTD or M50 completion had.

I agree that a coalition of very high calibre academics from both sides of the Atlantic and specific industry professionals are deeply opposed to this routing, I wouldn’t however give Vicent Salafia and Ruan Mac the credit for this, in fact I’d almost say that more support would have been forthcoming if a more moderate element were leading the campaign.

To spend 120,000 on newspaper ads when the arena that really matters is the Four courts was some waste by the NRA, and I heard tonight that the e-voting system has further revelations to come. Aparently the password to open the system could have been accessed through the help menu i.e. any of us could have voted a million times.

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.

This is a thread I am going to spend some time reading in the following weeks, but just to put down a specific marker, of what I wish to highlight, I will say the following. I was around enjoying the fine weather today and couldn’t help but notice, the amount of washed-up natives we seem to have around our city. I mean, people who obviously have seen some very hard times, and basically submitted themselves to much, much abuse down through the years… some of them barely able not to conduct themselves in a normal way, kind of wandering around, scared of the ghosts around the place, that nobody can see but themselves. It is sometimes like a time warp, where you are back in 1840s Ireland at the height of the Famine, where people were just simply desperate. I would just like to talk about the way people do get this way, and what we can do to prevent it. I mean, starting with a decent roof over one’s head must be the first thing, and then connecting that place of dwelling up with some suitable sense of community and well-being. I mean, the investment the city of Dublin does in preventing these problems is good I have no doubt,… but it struck me, how important it is to deal with the problem, before it goes too far. Once you find masses of urban inhabitants wandering around the place, with only a fragments of basic consciousness to navigate through their lives with, the problem has already gotten far too expensive to sustain. Take even recent projects such as ‘The Temple Bar’ area, how does any city ever allow that kind of an abomination to happen? Or worse, hope that anything useful can come from making such a place? I mean, it begins to weigh heavily upon all sorts of other things like our health services. We do love spending a lot of time in Ireland discussing our health service, when I just wonder, is more and more spending on the health service, just drawing the attention away from the other problems, at the opposite end – the ground level – the awful lack of afforadable and social housing and therefore, healthy and sustainable communities,… is just all the spending at one end of the social equation aggravating a problem at the other end? I am sure there are very good formulae and mathematics to calculate this – and furthermore, to calculate how much more you could save, by spending the money you do have appropriately, before the problem becomes far too expensive to even look at – and you have what we currently have now – a whole lot of buerocrats squabbling over ‘who started it’. None of them do seem to remark the obvious, of where I really think the problem is stemming from.

None of our politians seem to be capable of looking at the whole wider debate in its entirity – of realising that all things – the health service included – is linked up with everything else. Of looking at the problems as a system or issues rather than just isolated situations where some ‘fire-fighting’ is required. I hope that one thing that we can all learn from architecture and urban design – is that everything, education, employment, transport, health care, housing, energy, communications, industry, the whole lot…. are all part of something by itself – some huge social network of interacting relationships. It is like the politians are sometimes, like blind men with a huge elephant, every individual politian having a handle on his/her own part of the bigger picture. I mean, why do we pay the salaries of our public servants, just to be myopic? It is no longer a matter of how will we do social housing for Dublin, but how much is it costing us all, every moment that passes and we do not take the initiative. What costs are our grandchildren going to pay later, for our lack of ability to see something and do something now? When you have a large proportion of the urban population in Dublin, in as much trouble and difficulty, as I seem to see, a lot these days, I wonder what it is currently costing, and moreso, what it will cost as time goes on, to leave this situation, without doing that much about it. I am talking about a strong positive approach towards social housing and dealing with problems before they sprial out of control altogether. I would think, that with this kind of problem, your money is worth an awful lot more now, than it will be worth in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years time. Because when you get into second and third or more generations of problematic urban inhabitants, the cost seriously mounts up I would think. Not alone, is this problem costing the state, it is also affecting large areas of the city, which could work much better,… and furthermore, as generations continue to multiply, the problem obviously begins to engulf an entire urban area. The money spent on trying to solve problems, which we create in the first place,… is taken away from doing projects that really should help this city and country for generations to come. Then you have a bald attempt such as LUAS, which does very, very little in my humble opinion to get to the heart of the matter – yet it amounts to a gigantic expenditure for a small nation. I would wish that future projects are considered in a much more broad context, as I have described above – it is certainly not good enough, just to leave expenditure of that scale, only to the transport department. That is just too much like something Ireland would do. It is noticeable these days, during the nice weather, as the more respectable affluent members of the community, take it upon themselves to enjoy the fine weather, and suddenly come straight into contact, with problems on the street, which normally just go unnoticed. I think, it is one of those problems, where a little money invested at the right time, in the right way, in the right place, could save millions and even billions later. I do not have the expertise, analysis or experience to fully understand this phenomena, but would be greatful for any feed-back this board here has to offer. In short, I am just wondering how good, bad or indifferent has this cities track record been, with regard to the social housing design problem? What do we need to do to improve the cities performance in regards to this and many other matters? Thanks.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Call for ‘tourism spatial strategy’

http://www.rte.ie/business/2005/0620/tourism.html

June 20, 2005 13:12
The Irish Tourist Industry Confederation says research it has commissioned shows a fundamental change in the composition and spread of visitors to Ireland over the last five years.

The study, which looked at the regional distribution of tourism, shows that while Dublin has increased in popularity, areas outside of the capital have suffered serious losses.

As a result, the ITIC says that a ‘tourism spatial strategy’ is needed to identify the barriers to exploiting potential in the regions.

It is calling for the establishment of a Leisure Tourism Forum under the auspices of Failte Ireland, with representatives from Tourism Ireland, the Regional Tourism Authorities and the industry.

This new body would be charged with developing a new integrated programme to reverse the decline in bednights from tourists, through a national strategy ‘which exploits the complementary potential of tourism to Dublin and the rest of the country’.

The Irish Tourist Industry Confederation says it wants a more focussed marketing campaign to attract car ferry and coach tour passengers. It also wants improvements to the transport system, more access for walkers and restriction on drift netting.

The research shows that the number of nights spent by holidaymakers outside the capital in 2003 was 2.7 million fewer than in 1999 – a 14% drop in demand in four years. Dublin, during the same period, attracted almost two million more bednights. Increases were reported also in the South East and Midlands East regions – 16% and 3% respectively.

The net result was a decline of 3% overall in the number of bednights by overseas holidaymakers to Ireland, despite the fact that overall numbers of visitors increased. The ITIC says this shows the impact of the trend towards shorter trips.

The report argues that Ireland has lost its positioning in key segments of the British and European markets – with two million fewer bednights spent by British visitors in the western regions. It says the loss in visitors to rural Ireland is due to the changing profile of visitors attracted from Britain, and a sharp fall-off in activity holidays from Britain, especially following the foot and mouth scare in 2001.

The ITIC says the growth in Dublin highlights that Ireland is now attracting two distinct markets – those attracted to short breaks in Dublin and urban centres, and visitors motivated by the traditional appeals of scenery and people. It adds that this is a reflection of fundamental changes in the international pattern of holidaymaking.

It was interesting to read in todays IT that an ESRI consultant, Edgar Morgenroth has blamed urban sprawl on not having an attractive urban environment in cities. He gose further to state that is costing the Irish economy big time in terms of hours wasted by the average two hour daily commute. He estimates that E116.42 Million is lost a year before you look at environmnetal, community or family damage.

Apparetly the GAA is worryed by large housing estates being plonked beside rural vilages. Needless to say one off housing is looked on with favour either.

So do we believe its too late ? After all we are to spread out a city sustain metros or Dart exstentions and the City Manager has all ready stated how he dos’nt want to interfere in things, and even if he did, he would be limited by the parish pump politics of county councils outside Dublin.

Bertie Ahern proposed a Greater Dublin Athority (GDA) but that was four years ago and nothing has happend since. Sorry to sound pessimestic but dose anyone believe there is a way out of this mess ?

What do the members of this site believe are the essential chages that must happen soon. 🙁

I completely agree with the paper quoted. Suburban and ex-urban sprawl, particularly at the farcically low densities at which they are built, are the direct cause of increased reliance on the car, increased commuting times, consequent pollution, polarised mono-cultural communities, reduced cultural opportunity, a degraded rural environment, a missed opportunity re our towns and cities …… Ranting a bit but I could go on. That a country of 5 million people (inc. the North) (basically the size of South London) cannot plan its physical environment (which we all claim as so precious) in a sustainable fashion is a sorry indictment of politicians, local councillors, voters, planners, money grabbing gombeen men and the apathetic public at large. Contrary to the above I don’t think that the Irish have any real feel for nor commitment to a sustainable urban and rural future.

I have friends they have bought starter houses out in Kildare and to a certain extent I can sympathise given the cost in Dublin. But what are young working childless couples doing in a three bed houses with front and back gardens (they never use or concrete over) which they basically occupy from 7pm to 7am. A complete waste of space. The demographic of Ireland is such that two parent three odd child families are very very much in the minority yet we keep building and buying such inflexible space.

And as for the architecture don’t get me started.

Happy to flag a positive alternative.

The population of south London is less than 5 million! the total of London is about 8 million. it has been declining since 1950!due to migration to places like Nottingham etc.

Northern Ireland is 1.7million
Republic of Ireland 4.04million(2004)(expected to reach 5 million 2025)
I’m not defending the planning system etc. But ireland is growing faster than critics and planner ever thought and is growing ever faster , so it hard to get the balance when there is explosive population and when demand is greater than supply which is probaly one of the reason to why the sprawl is continuing to the extent.
The Celtic tiger is stlil in full swing so i don’t thin the sprawl will slow down either, well not this genration anyway !I think its totally inadequete and way out of proportion to allow so much suburban devlepment around little villages that totally destroy the charachter and the local community.

Apart from the current plans for future development of Ireland and the National spatial strategy , I wonder what will be the result of all this sprawl and to what extent will it change Ireland of the present day?
good and bad..

Dublin really needs to get a grip with it, If Dublin is now the third top tourist city destination in Europe after London and Paris , well they really need to sort out the mess before the city get totally choked and loses its status, because Dublin desrves to have all these tourist with the current problems,
Its getting to expensive to live in the city, which is forcing people out of the city which created a negative impact on the traffic as Dublin now depends so heavilly on commuters.therefore triggering more sprawl then more traffic, so its a no win situation!
Dublin is now one of the most car dependant cities in Europe. This is just crazy.
As a result of the Urban sprawl we now live a quarter of our day commuting in our cars, utter madness.
Ia there Any real Fecking plan for a decent intergrated public transport system.
I’m sick and tired of all these fancy plans on it etc..
and on the papers every few weeks and saying how much the government are going to spend and spend on , dates etc..
It took 20 years to get the Port tunnel started
M50 since 1990
the Metro is still high in the sky, and cost 2 billion to build!, when a large chunk of the metro system in Copenhagen didn’t cost much???
(even though Copenhagen is more diificult build underground and a more expnsive city )

Dictators (architecturally enlightened) and Bulldozers would be good.