Welcome to Ireland’s ugly urban sprawl

Major changes have occured within the operations of An Post (our impoverished version of a postal service)

Mail now only gets collected five times a week from Urban post boxes where there were 18 collections for most boxes only a few short months ago. Main Post Offices i.e. Urban ones other than the GPO were open 0900-1800 Monday to Saturday not these hours have been slashed and Mail is not collected from Post Offices on Saturdays.

What I don’t understand is that An Post is delivering more mail than ever and has the full benefit of wage moderation under the national wage agreements but yet is losing 92m per year.

The only possible cause is the continued expansion of Ireland’s ugly urban sprawl

Depressing indeed. You’d have to wonder if Dublin will eventually consume even the current commuter towns of Leinster, in the way it devoured the ancient villages and communities surrounding the city in the 19th century. What’s to stop it? Or rather who is going to stop it?
Whereas it’s unlikely to happen on anything like that scale, certainly a form of it is possible with one-offs and small isolated housing estates bridging the gaps between towns.

The growth in the population of ‘inner Leinster’ in the stats there from 287,000 to 413,000 compared with a substantial decline in Dublin City is shocking, even if improving painfully in recent times. What a mess.

Dundalk in fact.

<— says it here 🙂

Good point – not to get into it, but I’m not living there because I’ve been ‘driven’ from Dublin, or a desire to live in a rural area.
I’d like to move back soon.

Consider yourself one of the lucky ones being able to rely on a rail service as opposed to being car dependent such as those in Navan who must spend an hour plus to get from the Blancharstown S.C. to their work places in either the City Centre or Southside/Westside office parks.

While that article does indeed raise a few points, it is the intellectual, ecological media equivilant of a sun frontpage. It’s not only completely unbalanced, but it’s also totally unfair and inaccurate in its portrail of Ireland and is effectively a well put together rant.

Dublin is a relatively small urban area and does not remotely represent the rest of the Irish landscape. Yes, it does have major transport and urban sprwal problems, but they are not at all representative of the other 90%+ of the Irish landscape.

There are still plenty of beautifully painted multicoloured little towns dotted around the countryside that arn’t suffering from urban sprwal and 30 lane motorways.

I don’t know what the author suggest we do about Ireland’s extremely poor road infrastructure. We are at least 30 years behind the UK and the rest of Western Europe in that regard. We’re not building roads in any great quantities than any other western country ever has and we’re certainly not building anything like superhighways across the countryside.

If anything, our current road infrastructure is causing more CO2 output because it’s conjested but, more pressingly the existing infrastructure is causing thousands of unnecessary deaths. Irish main arterial routes are still largely single carriageway, dangerous and twisty and are killing/maming innocent people every year. Yes, the Gardai and others rant on about speed and drink driving but the reality is that most road deaths in Ireland are head on collisions on single carriageways and have relatively little to do with unusually bad driver behaviour. In fact, I’d argue that Irish drivers in general behave very well on our roads.

So, is the author suggesting that we simply stop moving around the country completely and take up cottage industries?

These roads have to be built, they’re minimal infrastructural requirements.

I would agree however, that some more money does need to go into public transport and I would completely agree that Dublin planning has been allowed to go out of control.

I completely agree with the point about Bord na Mona and peat exploitation. I have never been able to comprehend why this industry has been allowed to continue in operation. Peat production may have been necessary in the days of energy crisies in the 1940s when we had no access to alternatives, but it’s is insane to suggest that peat provides any sort of serious contribution to the Irish energy production. Why ESB went ahead with new peat plants is beyond comprehension.
Bord na Mona should simply be wound up.

The author needs to get some sense of perspective however. I get the impression he was brought on a tour of construction sites by environmental campaigners and then did a quick tour of a bleak Bord na Mona destroyed bog and based the entire article on it.

There is clearly a suggestion that Ireland should simply stop doing anything and be an ecological theme park / bird sanctuary.

And we are *NOT* one of the world’s worst polluters. Once you factor out growth rates (in CO2 emissions) our output of CO2, energy consumption rates etc are in the lower half of the European average. I do think we need to do more, but you can interpret statistics to prove any point.

I also think that article is horrendously unfair to the Irish tourism industry and the claim that photos were “stock photos” taken years ago is practically slanderous.

I once heard that if Dublin keeps growing at the rate it has been, by 2010 it will be bigger than Los Angeles. I wonder whether this is true or not?

Pepsi, you cannot compare Dublin to Los Angeles. L.A. is many times bigger than Dublin.

Mashadov, there’s plenty of “green belts” just a few miles from the centre of Dublin. This is where most housing should be built, rather than places like Mullingar etc. But because of the high cost of housing in Dublin, people are being forced out to these areas.

Holton, there certainly aren’t plenty of “green belts” left within a few miles from Dublin.
The Phoenix Park racecourse site, to give just one example, is quickly disappearing beneath one of the worst modern developments of recent times.
Unless you propose building over the public parks, which are not the same as green belts, I really don’t see where this space you are talking about is.

Yes it is good in a way – in that there is a clearer distinction between city and countryside in Cork than in other cities – but the downside of it is, as you say, the satellite town concept & its associated commuting/car dependency.

One-off housing I’d say, because most modern one-off houses are intrusive and they remove the commonality of the land.