gregos
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The Opera Centre isn’t an opera centre. It’s a shopping centre. It has nothing whatever to do with opera except for the fact that a diva once lived there.
This is another example of crass marketing by developers and it should have been resisted fiercely by the local authority.
It will be an embarrassment to all of us if they’re allowed to continue calling it this silly name.
I haven’t heard what the elected members have said, and therefore perhaps this is unfair. However, if Joe Leddin has said that the docks belong to the people of Limerick, I wonder in what sense he means that?
It’s unlikely that he considers the docks to be an amenity. There’s no access for the public. There’s no use the people can make of the general area. Admittedly, there continues to be a small, though dwindling, amount of prostitution in the area, which began when the Docks were a thriving concern, but again, that can hardly be what he has in mind. Furthermore, on the question of appearances, though the Docks do have the potential to both look and feel very good indeed, they’re a mess right now. So scratch the amenity. It isn’t an amenity.
In what other sense might the docks belong to the people of Limerick? Employment? Unlike a century ago, when whole communities sprang up around the docks, at a time when the Windmill area was known as “the flag of all nations”, there is now almost no employment arising from shipping, and what employment there is will only diminish. This is a reality. Foynes is a deep-water port. Limerick is not, and that commercial fact won’t be erased by wishing it out of existence.
It seems to me that what the elected members might be talking about is some nebulous concept of “belonging” in the rare-auld-times style. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a Limerick man who grew up at a time when you could walk around the docks and watch the ships unloading (before H&S, before insurance claims), and I have an emotional attachment to the place too. In fact, I’m a lot older than Joe Leddin, so I can remember the place as a working port, but I would like to see a solution that satisfies both sides of the debate. I’d like to see a solution that promotes a rejuvenation of the area, and a further embracing of the river by the city, but not at the expense of excluding the people. I would not like to see the place turned into a rich ghetto. Surely we can arrive at an answer that lifts the docks out of their current moribund state while at the same time reassuring the citizens of Limerick?
@justnotbothered wrote:
The Island is such a waste of the city, it should be a beautiful part of town but instead it’s completely given over to thugs from the Island field.
Every young fellow growing up in Limerick, including myself, has experienced this rite of passage: escaping the Island Field thugs. They should be protected with some kind of grant.
Well actually, yes, PoxyShamrok, I have a question. While welcoming the redevelopment of the new docks, I’d like to know why we’re spending a fortune of public money creating a tunnelled river crossing when there is now no need for one. There will be no commercial shipping, so why aren’t we building a bridge? Can somebody please tell me that, and could they please also throw some light on why this was not obvious at the planning stage?
Hawkins House is certainly appalling, but surely it doesn’t deserve the title of Dublin’s worst building? That must belong to O’Connell Bridge House.
I would agree with you about most of what you said, but I have to point out that the health board and the various charities don’t need permission from anybody to place individual families in houses. A single criminal family can utterly destroy a neighbourhood, and that is what these bodies are doing right now: destroying established communities. The health boards have never held themselves accountable, and the charities even less so. Nothing will change without their being forced to take account of the consequences.
In the new orthodoxy, you can’t criticise anyone without being shouted down. Nobody is responsible for their own behaviour, or that of their children. If your new neighbour brings a string of horses to graze the green areas of your neighbourhood, that’s his right. He has a tradition and a culture that you must respect. If his kids kick the ball into your garden to see if your back door is locked, you mustn’t say so, because that would be discrimination. The impact on you is not relevant, because he is disadvantaged and you are not. You and your spouse might work double shifts to pay the mortgage, and limit your family size so that you can educate them well. Another guy might not be able to find suitable work in this economy of full employment, might have twelve kids he can’t feed and won’t control. Who’s going to get the breaks – you or him? I’ll give you one guess.
Hi Ash1. Well said.
The shape of Limerick has been determined not by planners, not by architects, not by engineers and not by elected representatives. The current shape of Limerick has been, and continues to be, dictated by social workers. Good streets and solid neighbourhoods all over the city are being undermined by placing delinquent families in their midst without assessing the impact this policy has on the people who work and live there. This is because those who implement the policy are health-board administrators who have no ability to carry out such an assessment and have no qualificatioons. This is where power rests, and this is why people are leaving for the suburbs. Nothing will change until some neighbourhood group take a constitutional action to stop it. I personally know two people who cannot sell their homes because of the kind of people who have been placed next door to them, and at the same time can no longer afford to stay because of the threat to their children. This is a disgrace.
It doesn’t limit you to these dimensions. It means that, provided your building is within these limits, it’s deemed to satisfy the structural requirements, but anything outside these limits needs to be checked against the relevant codes. You don’t need an engineer: it’s not a complex anaysis, and it’s well within the capabilities of any architect. I say this as an engineer, by the way.
I think the Luas is expected to cost about 800 million euros. Fair enough. We don’t begrudge the expenditure of public funds to provide the people of Dublin with this fine public transport facility. Now, compared to Dublin, Limerick is just a tiddler with maybe 10% of the population, so perhaps we could look forward to tiddler-sized public funding of 80 million euros to build a light rail system here? How many chances, do you reckon? Two?
Hi Morlan.
Thank you for your response and I respect what you say. However, unfortunately I have to take it personally because this sort of thing has knock-on effects on my children and all others close to me. This entire perception of Limerick began due to laziness on the part of certain journalists. It’s very easy to create subliminal impressions through the selective use of language. This, in fact, is a well-established diplomatic technique. By way of example, I remember Robert Fisk talking some years ago about the protrayal of the Israelis in the media in contrast to the Palestinians. The Palestinians were described as carrying “Soviet-made Kalashnikov AK47 assault rifles” , whereas the Israelis carried almost cartoon-friendly “carbines”. What is my point here? Well let me give you another example. During the recent feud between a few scumbags who happen to live here, RTE main evening news opened with “Armed Gardai on the streets of Limerick”. Powerful stuff indeed and likely to create a strong impression. However, if the same gardai were deployed in, for example, Darndale, do you think RTE would lead with “Armed Gardai on the streets of Dublin”? I don’t think the Dublin-centric media would, actually, because they’d take care to appreciate the nuances of the way they reported events. That’s just a single example. As I said, these easy stereotypes have effects in the real world, right down to the way my children think about themselves.
regards
Greg
It’s an issue of personal responsibility but also a municipal issue. On the one hand, we now have a significant subculture of people who have absolutely no respect for anything. But on the other hand, we have indolent, lethargic and indifferent public authorities, in strong contrast to places already mentioned, such as Sweden, or even the Wee North! We also have zero enforcement of laws that relate to quality of life. To make a comparison, if some skanger flings his KFC wrappers into my garden, I’ll curse him, but I’ll also clean it up. Of course I will. What am I going to do? Wait till it goes away? We need to understand that we have to clean up , AND prosecute the offenders. As a matter of interest, how many people here routinely take the initiative and pick up litter on the street as they walk by? That would make a difference too, and it’s something we’d all do if we really felt our cities belonged to us.
Hi Morlan
I live in Limerick, and I was interested in your picture. I was wondering if this was standard off-the-shelf humour, or a flash of comic brilliance on your part. I was also wondering, while on the subject of sloppy thinking, are there are no bad areas in Edinburgh? People have mentioned names to me such as Pilton, CraigMiller and Niddrie, but I don’t know these places as I have never been there. That, however, as in your own case, shouldn’t deter me from posting humorous pieces about your home town. It shouldn’t, but it will, because I was brought up to have respect for others and not to bray about that with which I am unfamiliar.
Best regards
Greg
