hutton

@Frank Taylor wrote:

you just send the au pair up to Thomas’s

Tut, tut, tut. Frank, for sake of clarity – it’s the recession, even the good burghers of Foxrock can no longer afford the Au Pair; it’s just the Au One that they have to get by with these days – this is the Foxrock definition of a recession :p

FF removes ‘bribes’ councillor from ticket

Conor McMorrow

A Dublin councillor who was named in court as a beneficiary of bribes from former government press secretary Frank Dunlop will not be running for Fianna Fáil in next month’s local elections.

Tony Fox has been taken off the party ticket in the Dundrum ward for Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council by strategists in party headquarters.

It is widely believed that Fox would have been re-elected as he has a strong reputation as a dedicated worker in the area. This is despite being named in court proceedings last November when Dunlop app eared at Dublin District court to face corruption charges.

A Fianna Fáil spokeswoman said: “Tony Fox hasn’t been selected to represent the party on this occasion.” The names on the party ticket in Dundrum are Councillor Trevor Matthews, Tony Kelly and Aoife Brennan, daughter of the late Séamus.

Brennan (30) is set to follow her father’s footsteps into politics with her bid to get elected to Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council where she already works in a customer relations role.

Fox was not available for comment on his political future when contacted by the Sunday Tribune.

Dunlop has pleaded guilty to the charges of making corrupt payments to a number of members of Dublin City Council and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown county council between 1992 and 1997.

A CAB detective told Judge Cormac Dunne during an initial hearing last November that Dunlop had told gardaí on the day he was charged: “We always knew this day was coming and I will not be contesting the charges.”

Fox was named in five of the 16 charges along with Seán Gilbride, Jack Larkin, Cyril Gallagher, Tom Hand, Don Lydon, Colm McGrath, and Liam Cosgrave.

Dunlop’s sentencing hearing is expected to take place on 18 May, ahead of the local elections on 5 June.

May 3, 2009

Can we please re-title this thread to

“Quarryvale Nua, Carrickmines”?

Noting Justice Fergus Flood referred to Carrickmines previously, and prior to this particular controversy as “the epicenter of planning corruption in Ireland”, it appears nothing has been learnt. Good to see the Jackson Way Junction is now providing rise to yet more mess.

It is hard to escape the assessment that the tribunals have purely been a slow-release valve, which by not imposing significant sanction, have done nothing to deter what is at best ill-informed and irresponsible decision making by elected representatives. So lets make sure to name and shame them, again:

Fine Gael councillors:

Barry Ward

Maria Bailey

and of course not to forget:

Independent councillor Gearóid O’Keeffe,

I also note as reported by Fiona Gartland in the Irish Times that, “councillors had drafted the variation themselves without the benefit of legal advice”.

And we wonder why the Blueshirts are no different to the MaFFia?

There is clearly now no significant credible political party in Leinster House who can give leadership in whom we can have faith. Leadership without legitimacy is an oxymoron.

I got to say, faded and unkempt that it now appears, I have always loved the West shop front. What a wonderful joyful parody of WSC fronts. This is the camp swash-buckling caricature approach usually reserved for the Victorian interiors of theatres such as the Gaiety and the Olympia, turned inside-out and applied to what is usually the serious, sometimes po-faced, genre of the language of neo-classicism. How could anybody but love the over-the-top fanlights resting on the self-effacing golden pilasters? Rather than it becoming just another non-descript shop front as everywhere elsewhere in the city, restore and keep it I say! 🙂

@Devin wrote:

This Griffins Londis on Grafton Street must be the most outrageous shopfront in the city at the moment because it’s set amongst the largely minimal and professionally-designed fronts of the ‘higher end’ (or not so higher end) shops of the street but has all the worst and most brash attributes of a convenience store in Dublin: bad colour scheme, illuminated signs in the windows, posters on the glazing, multitude of cluttering projecting signs attached to shopfront, projecting sign above ground floor level, associated fast-food use, over-illumination at night, naff ‘traditional’ design of shopfront (with bad detailing and poor relationship between pilasters and console brackets), disharmony with the historic building above etc. etc.

It is contrary to probably 20 different objectives of the Architectural Conservation Area and Scheme of Special Planning Control for Grafton Street, and it’s in a very sensitive ‘tone setting’ location at the top of the street as you enter from the south ….. as if Grafton Street isn’t having enough problems trying to maintain what’s left of its upmarket character.

On online planning search on 49 Grafton Street returns no results, so they are not even pretending to have permission for it.

That is Efffing awful…. Subway seem to have gone on a real aggressive sub standard agenda of signage since entering Dublin market – Ive noticed a rake of UD subway fascias… Are DCC blind, and why do they allow such systematic breaches? 😡

@Gina Quinn wrote:

The council is proposing to keep on-street parking charges high for day-long commuters but is considering introducing new lower rates during the day to encourage shoppers and tourists

Dumb bint.

The council specifically prohibits all day on-street car parking]Premium parking in the city is a prohibitive €2.90 per hour, with the last increase of 20c per hour added for no apparent reason late last year[/QUOTE]

Maybe if Gina was to check, she might find DCC had discovered a massive – and increasing – black hole in their coffers, arising out of small matters such as Bernard McNamara and Joe O’Reilly baling on the €900m social housing PPP, leaving DCC having to direct an emergency funding of €100m just to rescue some elements?

Gina Quinn – as Basil Fawlty might say, a “cloth eared bint”

@Rory W wrote:

That’s a more than a little harsh – tactile paving could be implemented but the job could be done more sympathetically is the basic point here.

I hope you never suffer from a disability when there are people as sypathetic as you around

+ 1

As Graham said, it’s been resolved elsewhere; there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel or start getting hackles up at this stage in the game. The solutions are old news and should be standard procedure across the board.

(Which is of course exactly what I’ve done with is quote :))

@gunter wrote:

That’s a brutal photograph…it wasn’t that bad.

:rolleyes:

Oh yeah? Post up your snap so 🙂

Meanwhile I’ll happily quote you back one of your earliest posts, from the Dutch Billys thread.

I will be the first to acknowledge that you have made excellent contributions regarding Dutch Billys, and have added greatly to the collective knowledge of such stock – but I regret to say that in doing so your agenda is verging dangerously on the reactionary, in that you are doing so by down-playing the post-Billy Luke Gardiner initiated developments, of which Henrietta Street is obviously the first example.

In that regard, I would put it to you gunter, whether you are now blinding yourself by your own well-informed but nonetheless dogma driven stylist reactionary agenda?

Time for a little bit of political re-education perhaps? 😉

@gunter wrote:

So completely have the gabled streets of Dublin been lost, or masked, that the tendency has been to regard the dimly remembered curvilinear gabled houses as some kind of neanderthal off-shoot in the evolutionary process that shortly afterwards delivered the presumed perfection of ‘Georgian’ Dublin. Part of this may have been down to the agressive marketing of Luke Gardiner and his circle, who, in a very short space of time, managed to persuade upwardly mobile Dubliners that, not only were they living in the wrong part of town, but they were also living in the wrong design of house.

Whatever about the origins of the style, what developed here was a full blown architectural movement with a complex language and a real urban vitality that none of Luke Gardiner’s sober ‘Georgian’ street would ever equal, in my opinion. To compare a complex ‘Dutch Billy’ corner with the half hearted efforts of the Georgians is to compare a piece of sculpture with a photocopy.

The loss that Dublin suffered in going over to the Luke Gardiner led English Palladian model, and turning it’s back on it’s indigenous urban tradition, is not just about the near irradication of the whole record of an architectural style, it’s also about the substitution of a slightly superficial, segregated and imported model, for a truely urban, mixed use and socially integrated model.

I don’t want to keep dumping on Luke Gardiner, given that he has attained such iconic status as the developer that all other developers are supposed to look up to, but his legacy is decidedly mixed at best… I’m just suggesting that, in that analogy, that man is Luke Gardiner, and he is an ugly man, and he smells.

And

@gunter wrote:

Henrietta Street (the Luke Gardiner venture) is an exclusive up-market cul-de-sac of London type houses off an arterial route, with no attempt to integrate into the existing street or development pattern.

If it could be established, for example, that this Manor Street house was originally flat parapeted, and if it could be dated to before 1728, then I’d have lay off on Gardiner on that front anyway, and just concentrate on giving him a good kicking on the ‘shifting the city off it’s access’ point, and the ‘one house design fits all’ point.

“Luke Gardiner is an ugly man, and he smells”

Poor Luke! 😀

@GrahamH wrote:

gunter is suffering from the after-effects of sunstroke from his Billy holiday. I think a lie down for a week is in order.

Lol. +1 to that 😀

A few facts to clarify:

Having spoken recently to some of the owners, I can throw some light on this.

Firstly, to answer jdivision, the council have taken ownership of two houses, numbers 3 and 14 by CPO, previously owned by the Underwoods. The Underwoods no longer own any property on this street. The house referred to as being for sale, number 7 is indeed in serious need of restoration and €1m+ would be the very minimum to get a good start underway; however at under €2m acquisition cost for more than 8,000 sq feet, I wouldn’t consider this to be “silly money” – at 4 floors over basement, 4 bays wide, the building would make an excellent corporate HQ, and has an amazing double height hallway with a baroque ceiling. More details are at the bottom of this post.

Secondly regarding the points made by AJ and Johnglas, I thoroughly agree. The street has been left in a disgraceful condition, however I want to make a few further points here:

1) About 15 years ago Dublin City Council commissioned repaving of the street, setting in cobbles replacing tarmac; however they did this in the absence of professionally qualified advice, with the result that the load bearing of the new cobbles started collapsing the street into cellars. Dublin City Council’s way to rectify such a problem, and restore the city’s oldest street – well to fill in the cellars with concrete 😮

Understandably a number of owners who had bought houses to prevent demolition in the 60s and 70s went nuts about this and were forced to take legal action to stop the council doing this to all of their properties on what is Dublin’s oldest Georgian street.

DCC simply then sat back and left the street covered with roadworks bollards for over 10 years, during the boom, substantially devaluing all properties on the street. This has since been resolved 18 months ago with owners ultimately accepting reinstatement of the cellar forms in concrete, as they could no longer afford legal bills. In reinstating the public domain, DCC inserted brand new granite slabs rather than appropriate historic pavings, some of which I now see have subsequently been removed with tarmac once again featuring as pavement 🙁
No compensation or grants to do up the houses was given by DCC for the years of damage they presided over.

2) The monsterous block built at the end of the street was approved by Dublin City Council in 2003 – again the DCC planning department to blame, who should have stopped this.

3) Two years ago DCC produced a “conservation report”, which one would think would indicate that they now were going to show some commitment to the street. 10s of 1000s was spent on commissioning the report – however, once again no money whatsoever was allocated to the actual buildings themselves, except in fairness the structural consolidation of numbers 3 and 14, the houses CPO’d from the Underwoods. Hence in effect, a report that tells everyone how important the street is which is already well documented, and effectively nothing else.

4) Last year an “ideas competition” was commissioned up by DCC to reinstate the missing half of number 15; although a noble idea in itsef – and an excellent winning design – the reality on the ground is that no physical change occurs.

Are we beginning to notice a theme here? In my opinion it is very much at the door of DCC that the blame lies 😡

Bought by conservationists in the 60s and 70s as the buildings were under serious immediate threat, a number of the houses have been let to artists since the 70s which at least kept some life – however such lettings I do not believe would bring in much money. Instead should an owner wish to restore one of these houses, they will be further penalised by DCC with a development levies bill somewhere in the order of 40 – 70 thousand euros per house – so a further disincentive.

Despite all of this, the nuns did an excellent restoration of numbers 8 – 10 ten years ago, the King’s Inns have recently restored number 11, while numbers 5 and 6 have also had some works done in restoring the facades – as far as I am aware no grants money was made available by the state for these works. Furthermore I also note that number 13 is currently undergoing facade restoration.

Finally I fully agree that the street would make a tremendous amenity for tourism as an intact Georgian open air museum, particularly as it sits on top of what is now the ACA of Capel St – but it may be worth noting that there is absolutely no marketing of here or any other part of north Georgian Dublin. Instead just up the road two years ago DCC were happy to give the go-ahead to the demolition of the what they believed to be the birthplace of Richard Brinsley Sheridan at 12 Dorset Street. Subsequently refused on appeal to An BP, it then transpired the house wasn’t actually Sheridan’s as the street was renumbered – however despite this, the developer has since revised his scheme to reinstate that house and match it with a pastiche, and erect a plaque on the front noting BS’s connection with the street. So an amusing and happy ending there – but no thanks to DCC 😡

Hope this helps clarify a few points 🙂

Regarding number 7, the house for sale: http://www.daft.ie/searchsale.daft?search_type=sale&id=280077&map_lat=53.3537509049662&map_lng=-6.2529587399939&map_zoom=15&unique=7-2009.1-2.7839f27fdb159fc884b7df0eda1f2243&__utma=200121531.1343017351.1237777925.1237777925.1248873525.2&__utmz=200121531.1237777933.1.1.utmcsr%3Darchiseek.com|utmccn%3D(referral)|utmcmd%3Dreferral|utmcct%3D%2Fcontent%2Fshowthread.php&daftID=c52ecf8b278a46705d5fb771bc51ad2c&__utmb=200121531.4.10.1248873525&__utmc=200121531&fr=default&limit=10&offset=0