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Agreed it is rental levels that prevent high end retailers from opening on Grafton Street as a business case block. However the terms of these retailers concession and or supply agreements with BT may also prevent them from opening rival operations in Dublin for a specified number of years. Luxery retail is also not such a clear cut thing as analysing the size of an abc1 income level and acheiving scale. In China only Chanel and Christian D’ior have made any real profits. For whatever reason many people will buy luxury goods in Paris or Milan but not Dublin or Edinburgh.

Grafton Street has a long way to go to fulfill its potential.

Who else?

Although it would be a lot better if Mr Gleeson set national planning guidelines in general he probably should keep more of an eye on all commercial applications in locations such as this.

Put simply that area of the pier is the only area that has not been tinkered with and remains more or less faithful to its victorian origins. Filling in say 20 – 50 acres of sea to create a private or public-private leisure complex doesn’t appeal to me and would make the reaction to the Dun Laoghaire baths proposal look like a storm in an espresso cup.

The town has the best maritime facilities on the East coast between the subline East pier and Scotsmans bay / forty foot and most certainly doesn’t need a florida style gymmic project. If you want the beach go to Killiney, Sandymount or Rush.

The real blot on the landscape down there is Carlisle pier which the local harbour board mangaed to allow to rot despite the best intentions of Liebskind, SOM and Heneghen Peng. The last thing that is required is crayon plan a couple of hundred metres away.

In short the valid permission has lapsed so you have acted outside the regulations and effected an unauthorised development. However you do have a strong precedent in the form of the 1996 permission and pleading ignorance of the withering nature of a planning permission may have some justification. All objections are valid unless found to be frivious and or vexatous but without seeing the site and knowing what changes have been made to the development plan I couldn’t comment. The planner on the file will however be on top of both.

There is a copy in Rathmines Library

Some vague hope that the interconnector might be finished by 2016 with fianna fail claiming they will ‘accelerate’ construction of the interconnector as part of their election campaign, i.e attempt to bring it in on time.

Roisin Shortall who i reckon will be next transport minister whether it be FF/Labour or the Rainbow has raised the importance of the project a few times in the dail.

So possibly completion by 2016, a long 9 years away, but given the scale of the project & the way planning works here the best that can be hoped for i reckon.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/60minutes/main1415985.shtml

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2007/04/03/2003355067

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=942506&page=1

http://news.bostonherald.com/international/europe/view.bg?articleid=193313

As stated before it is the pace of change that is at issue and it is a lot easier to trust the above as even the Fox media Poll below predicts

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,175070,00.html

And there is consensus amongst the majority of scientists as per below

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26065-2004Dec25.html

But then we have our climate change arrest plan:

A few cent on chinese lightbulbs a few extra grand on a car to get the SSIA money back; but don’t look at your lifestyle build a house in the middle of nowhere; locate government jobs in places where there is no sustainable transport choice. Ban offshore wind electricity, buy carbon credits with taxpayers money.

That is a frightening thought; as much as we all suggest what we perceive to be better solutions to particular issues independence has been critical to the emergence ofthe rich economic and cultural tapestry that is modern Ireland.

The alternative being a remote province receiving the same priority as say Brittany or Wales. It is right that the memory is preserved of those who were unlucky enough not to survive the War of Independence.

However it raises the question as to how such national heros graves were allowed to deteriorate into a condition where such a sum needs to be spent. Surely a proper allocation in the past 10 years on a phased basis would have solved the problem.

I don’t go for the sun heating argument as it is usually followed by the Vinyards in Gloustershire and Tobbacco farms in Kent 17th Century speil. The sun may in fact be heating up but to expect that the sun which is billions of years old is heating up at the same rate of the earth is now doesn’t work for me. The sun probably is heating up but at a much slower rate. What is happening is that the atmosphere is becoming more opaque which is directly intensifying the effects of the sun which is leading to melting icecaps at the poles and higher rainfall in the tropics due to higher sea evaporation rates.

The simple solution is to reduce the sources of atmospheric gases before climatic effects intensify any further; I don’t subscribe to the doomsday scenario of a lunar earth but if current trends are carried on for another 25 years there will be serious problems.

I totally agree about the problems of pollution at home; no other country in the EU 15 has such a prevelance of illegal dumps or would permit a City lose its drinking water supplies in unexplained circumstances. Nor would it allow wholesale development of one off houses serviced only by septic tanks. Ironically it is the development pattern and not the power situation that will tip Ireland into real trouble with Climate change targets.

I think you are in a very small minority who are in denial that climate change exists. I do acknowledge its existence and concur with the vast majority of scinetists with the principle that whatever goes up must come down. Unfortunately in this case it tends to come down in some of the Worlds poorest regions and destroy the very little infrastructure they have. It is only since the problem started to affect America that Hollywood has taken much of an interest in this at all.

In relation to Nuclear Power it is inevitable that non-carbon intensive sources of power will have to increase very soon and at some point that may involve atomic energy but at this point in time it is far from proven to be the most cost effective option in the long term when the 10 year construction period, generation, distribution and disposal costs are taken into account. Personally I would prefer to live beside a nuclear power plant than Moneypoint but hey 10 years later after its conversion was first mooted by the Green Party its still burning coal because when it comes to the environment this government is great at soundbites and has no will to take action.

My real problems with Dick’s plan are that as opposed to cutting carbon we are buying credits this (a) does nothing to reduce emmissions and (b) if you don’t believe in climate change you should be livid that €1bn of taxpayers money is going to be given away when clean alternatives costing nothing exist.

The only thing that this plan acheives is that all those who saved on SSIA’s with the idea of buying a new motor will give Dick not only their SSIA free money and interest but also now a larger chunk of the principal invested as well. There is nothing free from this government