Frank Taylor

Thanks for that Graham, I had looked for replica antique glass in the past and failed to find anything.

@Paul Clerkin wrote:

ahhh Paris,.,,,, I know where I’m moving to when I win the lottery

agreed on O’CST, it looks very cluttered – why do they need lamp standards on the median? surely good light on the edges should have illuminated it

I think the champs elysees was recently renovated with new street furniture and parking bays removed from the area between the lines of trees and the buildings along the avenue. There are still 10 lanes of traffic remaining. When I lived in Paris for 2 years it never occurred to me to use a car to get anywhere. In any case, I’d prefer if the traffic lanes were replaced with a park.

In 1990 a French agricultural group put on a reclaim-the-streets-style installation composed of 15,000 pallettes of living wheat that they then harvested.

I don’t understand -what is the proposed change?
If you have a small cafe you can get a wine and beer licence. So what’s new? Is it that the cafe doesn’t have to serve the alcohol with food? Also, I would have thought that the real hurdles to opening new bars are planning permission and property prices.

@JPD wrote:

Thats interesting about the wills but back to the issue, none of you have proven why rural paople shouldn’t be allowed build houses in rural areas. All you Dublin 4 types keep saying is they look ugly to your vision of the Countryside and that bins can be collected cheaper from the Streets of Dublin 4. As for roads have any of you left the main roads in some Counties? You could dissapear into some of the craters I have seen.

How about living in a village rather than open countryside? Is Ballydehob just that bit too urban?

One approach to one-off housing development would be to allow it but only on the basis that the owner paid the true increased costs for all services provided.

There is also an issue of fairness: if rural people should always be allowed to build in their areas then why not Dublin 4 people? Most young people from the area of Dublin I grew up in can’t afford to live there and have moved out to places like Lucan. Shouldn’t they be allowed to build a house with more storeys and a smaller garden on their parents’ suburban plot? I think they should, but planning rules state that this type of development would not be in keeping with the scale and form of the rows of stumpy bungalows built there in the 60’s.

@Graham Hickey wrote:

A good piece of journalisim, although I found the linking of the Stardust disaster in such an indirect fashion to Mr Grant a tad sensationalist.

300 people are going to sleep in a fire hazard hostel on Gardiner street tonight despite the fact that everyone is aware of its non-compliance with fire regulations. The link looks pretty clear to me.

This article from last weeks Sunday Times discusses some of the consequences of shopping centres on freedom of speech:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2766-1542947,00.html

Garethace,

Bear in mind that in order to raise venture capital, entrepreneurs sell the most commercially optimistic possibilities of every technology. 95% of the time these visions fail to materialise. When you want to sell a vision, it helps to have a good story, a credible, fascinating narrative – something a journalist can re-use to entertain his readers. As a result, the media is full of overblown technological prophesies that we later look back on with shame and amusement.

Shops have collected vast quantities of point-of-sale data for decades and have mostly obtained little value from it. I can’t see any difference between modern loyalty card schemes and green shield stamps.

Architecture is losing market share to information systems. You buy from Amazon, so there’s less money to pay an architect to do a new Waterstones. But there is also competition from edge-cities. Lots of buildings that are obviously devoid of architectural input line the M50. This type of retailing cares less about architecture than a city centre flagship store like Arnotts or Selfridges- but this doesn’t matter because these boxes have very short lifespans. Every time I drive past Dunnes in Cornelscourt it seems to have another plastic makeover. I’m glad it’s so ugly because nobody will miss it when it’s gone

I was wrong to say the church was on Park Road…
http://homepage.eircom.net/~dlmc/

@kefu wrote:

I don’t know what annoys me more, the delays in construction of roads or the unwillingness of people to pay for them.

Unwilling? People queue to pay the M50 tolls which, to an economist, indicates that the tolls are set too low.

Also from the EIS:

Effectively the proposed scheme will replace the existing N3, which will becomes an all-purpose alternative to the motorway

So, you can choose to drive along the old road or pay to use the new one. I guess the tolls will be set at a level so that people are not discouraged from using the M3, otherwise everyone will stick to the old road, and the private tolling company won’t profit.

When a road is busy you’ve got to pay for it one way or another, either by direct tolling or by queuing in traffic jams. If you have an economically productive aim to your journey (like getting to work) you may prefer to pay the toll then sit in your car listening to Morning Ireland.

A discussion about Dundrum shoppping center and twon centres is coming up on Today FM (Matt Cooper) today.