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How about building boardwalks along the Lee? Start with the Quay oppposite the City hall ( name escapes me). By the way, I have to say the Less looks and smells better than before.
Cullen may not be all that bad. He was decisive on the Electronic voting, decisive but wrong. If convinced of the interconnector he may bullheadedly push it through.
An Tasice are a reactionary body. I use that term for any group of people who fetishise the past regardless of the merit of past ideologies, or – in this case – buildings ; and always oppose the modern. There can be much to oppose in modern day architecture, but An Taisce opposes everything – it seems – with no regard to the merits of the new buildings, or the demerits of the old.
As a reactionary body they tend to attract the most reactionary people in the State: Old Money. I suspect that is obvious from the membership of An Taisce in the Cork area ( who are I notice too busy objecting to everything to appear on this board to defend their actions in Cork – I suppose an Internet Bulletin board which attract people interested in architecture from Cork is too beneath them – even if they were, any of them, to own a computer). They are a totally unaccountable and unelected group, unaccountable even to popular discussion on this or any other forum where they could be challenged,, and given a soft ride by the local press which should name them. ( I talk now, in particular of the Cork branch).
As for the preservation of the old buildings like the Warehouses ( or Stack A in Dublin) – it reminds me of a line from ChinaTown.
Jack Nickolson accuses the corrupt politician John Hillerman of being “respectable”. Hillerman responds ( this is a paraphrase cos I’m lazy)
” Respectable. I suppose I am. Crooked politicians, whores, and old buildings all become respectable if they last long enough”
The SPire is 3-1, second favorite to win, although they are all close. In a year without the gherkin I presume it would be favorite.
Same opening hours as London. The thing is as an Irish artist when granting an interview to a London paper, ‘specially the Liberals, about Ireland, is that you must be critical of the old sod, and get a dig in about the Catholic church too. So he did both.
There was that guy who had the beamish protest!
Let me say as a non-Corkonian who lived there for a time, that I am delighted to see the love Cork people on this site have for their city, and the proactive attitude to changing things for the better.
It was always a beautiful city, but there was some of an attitude of “Era, sure it’ll do” back in the day.
Move over boys; new generation in town.
HaHa: The economic illiteracy at IndyMedia is hilarious, as is their belief that anyone who owns a second house is “ruling class”. That would make my barber ruling class, since he owns 2 houses – and rents one, or so he said last weekend. He just got lucky on the capital appreciation from when he bought the first house.
A “marxist” philosophy that pits lumpen squatters against working class people with two houses bought with mortgages is probably not going to get the critical mass of “proletarian” support they think – quite the opposite.
( I should point out that I am in the renting sector myself)
There will always be an anti-LUAS story in the Tribune. That is what they do. It sounds like nonsense .
Do we assume that after the criminals steal from a shop they run to the luas, get their ticket, wait in line, are visible to any number of commuters ( no doubt the thieves whistle nonchantly with bulging pockets), and there they go into town, awkwardly carrying a new widescreen TV without a box, everybody feigning indifference. I doubt it.
If Platform11 are Fine Gael’s rail policy advocates then I may vote Fine Gael at the next election, though it goes against the grain, to get this implemented.
I am from CLonmel, though I haven’t lived there for a long time, and have just returned from the US. I fully support their ideas on the direct Clonmel Dublin line. I could care less about the Waterford Clonmel line, nor Waterford Limerick.
Buses are just as fast on those short lines.
As a Dublin resident, I fully support their ideas on the Dublin lines. The airport metro sucks. It seems to me to be the modern day equivalent of the only dual carriageway we used to have outside the Naas road – Limerick to Shannon. Keep the tourists happy, thinking we have good infrastructure – while the taxpayer resident rots. It is easy enough to get to the Airport using the Dart and the AerDart, even as it is.
As someone fond of the West – who thinks that the west gets a bad deal in infrastructure – I nevertheless do not support the western rail corridor – build a failed line which needs to be subsidised and you will never get another line opened again.
It’s hard to know where you are coming from Ewan, platform11’s ideas just make sense.
The article in lipmagazine seems to prefer rundown derelict American style town centre’s to “gentrification”, or even Parisian lived in town centres – which it effecticely denounces as MiddleClass.
Each to their own. It seems to miss the point that most of these American city centres were choc a bloc prior to WWII, that suburbanisation removed the middle class from the city centres, and the balance is being redressed now; but not with much success , in fact – outside of the actual Cities mentioned in the article. Read instead this article from the Guardian yesterday, a fate to be avoided.
Thanks Lexington. You’ve convinced me that the late development in Cork makes sense, due to pent up demand.
I understand Cork fairly well, having lived there – in the City centre – for 4 years. My visit to UCC was on business so I had no time to sight see.
I still think that Dublin, during it first stage of it’s redevelopment boom, had made more progress, but it had more progress to make – much of it was derelict, before, while the City Centre in Cork was not. Remember Bachelor’s walk, and surrounding areas, and Temple bar before the redo. Gardiner street, the Docklands. I could go on.
The centre of Cork never had these problems, with most of the social problems in the ‘burbs – Knocknaheeney, for instance – and even there, never as bad as Dublin at it’s worst.
So I suppose it could not be changed as much. I would like to see more buildings on the quays, and that bus station redone. And I really dislke Merchants Quay and the way it ignores the river.
Some development of the opposite side of the quays there would be nice, too.
Sorry to hear about Sir Henry’s. I was in Cork for the first time in about 5 years some weeks ago, and did not notice a huge amount of different development – compared to Dublin – with the exception of Patrick Street which was then not finished, and had some construction work to be done. No cranes dotted the city. I did see the new building at UCC, the student’s uniion I think. ( i was in Cork for a day only, so I have have missed stuff)
Reading this thread, it seems there is a lot of development to come. I am wondering, however, if this is not all a bit late in the day? The property boom cannot continue forever;property prices may crash and will certainly level, what then of the massive development planned for Cork?
And why does Cork need all this retail and office development now, when there was no need for it at the height of the boom years? Is there really the increases in population we have seen in Dublin – most migration – internal within Ireland and external into Ireland – is to Dublin.
Shaun,
To handle this:Check out Platform11’s site:
The interconnector will contect the main stations in Dublin. If the existing commuter lines are electrified we get an immediate pan-city DART service.
Here is a quote from the Platform11’s site.
Further on from “there” would be a €1.3bn underground electrified “Interconnector” that would link all of Dublin’s commuter train and Luas services as well as intercity services and add a new spur to Dublin Airport and the Meath suburb of Dunboyne. By 2010, under the plan, a commuter could step off a Cork train at Heuston and hop on a train to the airport via the city centre Already spending money at a lick of €250m per year, the grand plan would cost about €3bn.
At the end of the spend, Dublin would have an integrated commuter rail network capable of serving, all the major towns within 100km of the capital city and a rapid and regular intercity service. At this point, commuters probably need to suspend their belief. There isn’t even an hourly service from Greystones or Malahide to Dublin city centre right now, never mind Cork. And before the Department of Transport give the company’s €3bn plan the green light, there will be plenty of debate around whether the country should bet so big on rail.
and
To get more trains into the ‘central zone’, priority will be given to a spur off the existing commuter into a new train station at Spencer Dock in the city’s docklands. A signalling investment will increase trains to 16 per hour, further easing the bottleneck at Connolly.
Trains from Maynooth could be run underneath the Phoenix Park and bypass Connelly and terminate at a new station at Spencer Dock, which would then link into a Luas extension. This too would take pressure off the bottleneck.
Upgrading the Kildare line will not come too far behind. “We have to increase capacity on the Kildare line,” Meagher told an Oireachtas Transport Committee in February. “The problem is that the vast majority of our intercity customers want to travel between 5pm and 7pm and, so do our commuter passengers. If we send a commuter train out serving all or most of the stations along the way, we can’t send an intercity train for 25 minutes. Clearly, that’s a problem,”
The solution, says Meagher, to existing rail infrastructure. is “quadrupling” adding two extra tracks along the lines. More delays? Yes, but nowhere near as sever as one might imagine. Iarnród Éireann owns the ‘way leave’ along the track and should be able to manage the upgrade.
I believe they are going to electrify this line as well.
This is not the metro, which will serve very few people for the same money. I have only recently been to platform11’s site but they are very good on this issue. The interconnector is the way to go.
As you point out the AerDart is good as it is – a DART spur to the airport would be much cheaper than a metro, and everything else would get done as well for the same price as one metro line.
Who cares what the plebs think anyway? What do they know? The usual response of Dublin howiyas to a work of this scale is to moan about the cost, complain that it should all have been spent on hospitals instead, and criticise it as the personal work of a politician they don’t like e.g. why is Bertie sticking up this pole in O’Connell Street.
Somtimes, to be fair , they say it could be spent on the homeless instead.
(We should try and solve the homeless problem, I think, so we can build bridges and roads with less noise from the usual suspects.)
This piece from Alan Stanford in the Indo
A couple of things, apparently unconnected, caught my eye in the paper over the last couple of days. It would appear that Dublin City Council is now getting cold feet over the cost of a new bridge over the Liffey in the docks area. The bridge in question has been designed by Santiago Calatrava, who has graced the Liffey with another of his designs, at a far shorter crossing, upstream. The cost, it seems, has grown from an initial €20 million to an estimated €38 million. You all know the formula. When you want a builder to do something in the house, take the estimate and double it and you get something like the real figure.
It’s the same with cities. Whatever needs doing will always cost more than they tell you it will. But usually it’s because they haven’t factored in all the possibilities. With this bridge it seems they have. Not only is it to have four lanes for traffic but space for a possible Luas line as well, even though there is no Luas line planned for the area yet. There will also be pedestrian and cycle lanes. All in all a bridge for all of us to use with ease comfort and space. And just in case a ship wants to go upstream of it, the whole thing will pivot to let it pass. In other words, somebody or possibly some group of planners have thought long and hard and decided exactly what will be needed, not just for the next few years, but into the foreseeable future and then planned for it.
And then the panic starts. The price has risen. Then the cost of building, steel, workers, tea and sandwiches and any other possible excuse will be used to talk down the price or the design or worse still, cancel the whole thing. And then, in 20 years time, when the gridlock of the Dublin streets has finally claimed its first victim of ‘starvation by traffic jam’, someone in the City Council will say: “Let’s build a bridge and wouldn’t it have been better to have done it 20 years ago when prices were cheaper?”
It’s a rare thing for any politician to plan for anything more than five years ahead; that being the gap between their being elected and the next time they will have to face the electorate. Long-term planning is something usually done by civil servants and undone by politicians who cut expenditure to impress the voters with their fiscal rectitude, because where grandiose ideas may get votes, long-term cost doesn’t. But where such expenditure is all that lies between us and transport stagnation, spending, however much it might hurt, is what we must face.
We live in a country that is growing rapidly. In the first 50 years of this State we cut back on practically everything that would get us moving. We axed a perfectly good rail network which, next to their parliamentary and judicial system and their architecture, was the best thing perfidious Albion left us.
We failed for far too many years to invest in our roads and failed even to recognise where those roads may need to be created. We have never recognised that public transport and the movement of people around our cities and country is a necessity, not a luxury. Public transport should not be expected to break even, much less make a profit. It is an expense we all should bear in order for the nation to work efficiently.All of our major cities are dissected by a river – the Liffey, Lee, Shannon and Corrib. Indeed, Galway has the addition of a lake as well as a river and Cork has two branches of the Lee. Whatever about the other cities, and I am sure it is as true of them with their rivers, the Liffey is the single biggest traffic obstacle in the city of Dublin. Traffic must either run beside it, across it, or eventually, when the M50 is widened and the tunnel complete, around it. Therefore any progress we can make in bridging it must be grasped with both hands and quickly. And don’t count the cost in euro, count it in comfort, efficiency and progress. Otherwise they’ll use the same excuse to block the Metro as well.
I think everybody is being pessimistic.
Unlike the once off country housing issue, where there is a clear ideological divide between elite thinking and mass thinking; there is no such divide, now, with regards to Dublin sprawl.
Nobody defends Dublin sprawl, and nobody wants the city to be twice it’s present footprint in 20 years, least of all the people living on the edge of town, like Rory W.
Ireland often succeeds in producing the best from the worst; we had to replace an horrible operator run phone system in the late seventies with the best digital system in Europe at the time. This transition won’t be as simple, but if the DTO plans work out, and DCC’s plans for the regeneration of the centre we will have a very liveable city within 20 years. If we could accelerate that, lets do it too.
Diaspora said
If 40% if semi-redundant institutional lands in the Dublin City Council area were developed for medium/high density housing it would provide 38,000 homes, he is on record as saying that the 40% to be developed should be done so along public transport corridors.
Well, yes. Lets do that. But are you sure the figures aren’t higher? I remember reading somewhere that brown field development in Dublin could release enough land for 300,000 houses.
