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Re bendy buses: answer officially is anti-social behaviour on upper deck.
Re road pricing: I’m aware of the windscreen style pass system. But it would be subject to rampant abuse, that’s all I was saying. Where would it start and finish.
Would it be the so-called inner orbital route (very roughly Gardiner Street, Church Street, Patrick Street, Stephen’s Grenn) or at the outer orbital route (the circular roads and the canals)
If it was the outer, which would be only proper, there must be 200,000 people living within, many with cars.
My main point is say if one had cottage in Rialto and was entitled to windscreen pass. Knowing Irish people, all of a sudden, you’d have about ten people registered as living in each house for the purposes of free travel.
We can’t close off the city centre because all of the multi-storey car parks (grant-aided when they were built) are very central.
Think of how many there are: Arnotts, Jervis Street x 2, Andrew’s Lane, Brown Thomas, aso.
They would go bust if the city was closed off. Most of them should never have been built but DubCityCouncil could never afford to pay them off now.
Also, what about the people who live in the city centre. How do you do road pricing for them?As they say, I think Seamus Brennan says more than his prayers.
The guy has made more wild suggestions in the past three months than the rest of the Cabinet. He just shoots off at the mouth and nothing ever comes of any of it. All his ideas are half-baked, and not thought out. He also interferes where he has no business. The DubCityCouncil road signs debacle was a classic example. Surely, those signs would have been better than what we have now – which is nothing. I think we’d be half-used to the new traffic layout signs by now, only for Bullshit Brennan.The GAA wanted to open it up so that trains from Kerry and Cork could wheel around as far as Connolly, nearer Croke Park.
But Iarnrod Eireann said it was a big job, capacity wise, and would require a new turning circle, which the GAA would have to pay for.
Other than that, it is in perfect knick. It connects with the Mullingar-Connolly line near Glasnevin cemetery.Somebody e-mailed me this. Sounds very interesting.
LÉARGAS
Thursday 14 November 2002
7.00 A FASCINATING JOURNEY UNDER THE STREETS OF DUBLIN“We’re entering the kingdom of the rats. This is their world. They live in the underground of Ireland, not just of Dublin. But they are afraid of you as you are of them. Up to now they haven’t bothered me personally”. (David Green, Dublin City Council Drainage Division, speaking in the underground Poddle river.)
This week Léargas, in a programme called Baile Ãtha Cliath Faoi do Chosa, goes places where no camera has been before – into the dark and sometimes dangerous world of Dublin’s underground. Presenter Fachtna Ó
Drisceoil and David Green of the City Drainage
Department, brave sewage and rapidly rising waters in a tour of Dublin’s underground river, the Poddle. Archaeologist Annaba Kilfeather travels the same journey on the surface, revealing the Poddle’s secret history as she goes. The programme discloses some of Dublin’s best kept secrets. We enter the Liffey tunnel, close to the East Link Toll Bridge. We travel through the Phoenix Park rail tunnel, which isn’t used for passenger rail even
though it connects Heuston and Connolly stations.A newly discovered medieval slipway in a Merchant’s Quay basement is still covered at high tide by the Liffey’s waters, just as it was 700 years ago. The City’s original poor house – which later became the Foundling Hospital – has been re-discovered and incorporated into the basement of a modern extension to St. James’s hospital.
The programme also features the mummies in the crypt of St Michan’s Church and – bringing us right up to date – the first television pictures from inside the Dublin Port Tunnel.
Quotations:
“While a lot of work is done in the Liffey tunnel,
it’s out of sight and out of mind. If the work wasn’t done properly and there was no water in the tap and the sewage was coming back up the toilet people would know all about the Liffey tunnel!” (Peadar O’Sullivan, Senior Engineer with Dublin City Council, talking about the Liffey tunnel which carries main
water and sewage pipes, as well as electricity
cables.)“It’s very quiet there and if you are interested in philosophy it’s a good place to meditate. In the middle of the city, with the Financial Centres behind, you can be in tune with nature down in the tunnel!” (Peadar O’Sullivan.)
“For those who are directly in the face it’s one of the toughest jobs you can find. They work in very confined space. It’s very hot. It’s incredibly noisy. Let me put it this way -it’s not the most desirable occupation but they are tough men and they’d need to be.” (Timothy Brick, Deputy City Engineer speaking
about the Dublin Port Tunnel.)“There is so much stuff under our feet that people would be really amazed. They think they’re walking down modern streets but the footprint of the past is just beneath them.”
(Linzi Simpson, Archaeologist)I find Irish towns and cities look best in that sharp Autumnal/Wintry sun when it’s bright but still very shadowy. Partic the quays in Dublin.
Aside from o’toole’s Sunday Times articles, I think there’s some good architecture/planning articles in the property section of the Irish Times.
Frank McDonald often writes them but they’re usually buried midway between Sherry Fitz and H&M ads.
I do think there’s a huge fear of putting that stuff in main section chiefly because of what Conor Brady called ‘metropolitanism’.
They’re afraid of doing a page about Dublin, because the culchies will write in and bemoan the fact that they are being ignored.
But, I genuinely think that what happens in the capital – especially considering its size – has a national significance. Everybody visits Dublin at least once a year.From http://www.reflectingcity.com
The Heuston Gateway: Introduction
In April 2001 Dublin Corporation commissioned the Urban Projects led team of Fergal MacCabe, Faber Maunsell and DTZ Sherry Fitzgerald to undertake an urban study of the Heuston Station Environs, culminating in the production of a Regeneration Strategy Framework Plan for the area. The overall objective given by Dublin Corporation was “to produce a regeneration strategy which will incorporate an urban design land use framework plan for the Heuston Station Environs.”
These people should be able to help
I don’t think that just by having a work by a famed architect (in this case Calatrava), it necessarily puts the city on the map.
I think you actually have to have a signature work and an original for it to be of any great worth.
In future years, when Calatrava’s great buildings are featured and discussed, it will be the bridges in Seville and Bilbao, the railway station in Lyon, the opera house and so on that will be mentioned, not the two bridges in Dublin.
For example, I think the Spire will be a genuine landmark as would Libeskind’s plans for Dun Laoghaire, if built. They are originals, which are designed with their location in mind and not just expediency.I recall Calatrava losing a significant international competition and one of the judges saying that he was now involved in ‘design by numbers’. I think there is a significant element of that with his work, even though I do still think both bridges will be very attractive.
I also think it’s very questionable the fact that Dublin City Council commissioned him to do two bridges, rather than have a competition. Like with anything, I think direct commissions are an excuse for laziness because you’ve no reason to stretch yourself, when you’ve already got the job.Speaking of buildings that look like other buildings (just in case anyone is interested). I noticed this one a good while ago. When I first saw National Gallery extension, I thought to myself that this looks extremely familiar. After a couple of months, I realised it bears a strong resemblance to Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.
http://www.arcspace.com/kk_ann/2001_12_17/Actually, I think I’ve just found one of them.
This looks like Blackhall Place Bridge:
http://www.inn.it/wellness/arredourbano/MURCIA/ponte1.jpg
Here’s the main page if anyone understands Spanish – http://www.inn.it/wellness/arredourbano/MURCIA/NuovaMurcia.htm
apparently the two bridges in Spain HAVE been built but I’ve not been able to find any on the Web so far.
Can’t help but notice that Blackhall Place Bridge is very stumpy compared to what I’d thought. Looks nice but is much lower in height that what the original plans would led me to have believed.
According to DCC, they’re hoping to officially open it in January 6, which is the day that Joyce’s the Dead takes place on. Don’t know whether they’ll meet that deadline but it will be close.
Also, tenders for Macken St Bridge due to be advertised around end of this year with construction to begin middle of next Summer.
PS – Have a look at http://www.calatrava.com and see the Mercia bridges and then the Irish bridges – spot the difference.I particularly liked this particular nugget of architectural appraisal from N3.
‘I stopped drinking there when I was
about 17 because the crowd was a bit
young.’i’m no cheerleader for an Taisce and I hate a lot of what they’ve done, partic re highrise, but I think Ballsbridge has been quite literally made a balls of. Only the Herbert Park complex has any great merit. Everything else, and by this I mean 20th century development, is a bit of a mish-mash, which rarely fits in with the surrounds. Much of it would be dreadful no matter where it was.
I think everybody is in favour of them. The major wind farm in Mayo is very elegant. There is also a smaller one in Connemara. Two huge ones are planned off Arklow and off the coast of Derry. Here’s what Kevin Myers thinks, from recent article. Thank God nobody ever listens to him.
Wed, Sep 04, 02
An Irishman’s DiaryThank you, Eamon Sweeney, for allowing me to return to the issue of wind-farms, another voodoo heresy of our time. Replying to a recent column about the effects of wind-farms on wildlife, he wrote: “Of course lumbering raptors such as the lovely vulture will be shredded occasionally, but the idea that windmills will decimate the grub-eating bird and bat population is fatuous,” writes Kevin Myers.
If he had gone to the trouble of reading my column before being so very smart, he’d have known that I wasn’t dealing with an “idea”, nor did I use the word decimate. I was dealing with a fact. Spanish wind-farms are now believed to kill millions of birds and bats a year. In the US, wind-farms are killing bald eagles, a protected species, the whole time; and since these deaths are an actuarial certainty, the companies are liable to criminal prosecution.
Should energy issues be decided on the effect on wildlife? Well, isn’t that the whole point of the increasingly shrill hysteria from the green corner – that the planet is not ours to destroy, but to protect? And we protect it by erecting vast bird-threshing plants on our coasts, is that it? To be sure, wind power is a nice way of making money. Legislators throughout Europe, with the myopia of their species, have obliged electricity grids to buy what is called “green” energy. But why are wind-farms called “green” when they are surrounded by the corpses of birds, and when their existence is made possible only by subsidies from carboniferous or atom-based energy systems?
Tax breaks and subsidies
Even if wind-power were economically viable – and it isn’t, without tax breaks and subsidies – it still requires a traditional power-station grid alongside it. So what’s it to be? Coal, peat, oil, gas, biomass or nuclear? The first five are CO
2-generating: the last is the least destructive to the ozone layer – if, that is, you believe (as the Greens do with dogmatic passion) that the burning of fossil fuels is the primary reason for its diminution. Those six are your choices. What is not a choice is wind, though this doesn’t stop the wind-farms from going up.
Two are projected for coastal waters, where planning permission isn’t needed. One is off Wexford, the other off north Derry. Both are on sandbanks, but there are serious doubts that the Wexford bank is strong enough to sustain a wind-farm with its massive foundations. And the Derry proposal is the sort of thing that might be dreamt up by a group of hippies.
This is one of the most famous coastlines in Europe, legendary for its evening light. Jimmy Kennedy was inspired to write Red Sails in the Sunset one evening there. One day soon, another songwriter can write a similar song there too if the wind-farm proposals go through – only the sails will now be on windmills, and they will be red from the flocks of sea-birds smashed into pulp by the blades.
Bright colours
Fortunately for future generations of songwriters, these sails – being some 150 metres high – will be perfectly visible from land. They will have to be lit at night, and painted bright colours, to avoid being a hazard to shipping. The project will cost in the region of £200 million; or so we are told. That figure doesn’t take into account the cost of removing the wretched things when they have come to the end of their useful life, merrily turning the air pink with bird-pulp. That coastline is the most visited tourist attraction in Northern Ireland. What future tourists will want to see gannet-mashing machines? None, of course; and that makes a perverse sort of sense, for the economics of wind power are all based on juju. Denmark, which has the largest number of wind-farms of any country in Europe, charges 12.21p sterling per kilowatt hour. Northern Ireland charges 9.45. The Republic charges 6.98. In other words, wind is viable only where energy is expensive, not merely because it is capital intensive to start off with, but because, relatively speaking, there are so few occasions when it works.
Ordinary power stations work 24 hours a day. Wind-farms can’t work when the wind is too high or too low. The Middelgrunden wind-farm in Denmark is working barely 30 per cent of the time. As I said in my last – but by no means my final – column on this subject, the vast wind-farm in the Brecons in Wales, 50 square miles of churning blades, each over 150 metres high, will produce just 1 per cent of the power generated by the Wylfa Head nuclear power station in Anglesea. Unlike Wylfa Head, it will be the world’s biggest bird-blender.
Local impotence
Meanwhile, a beautiful landscape, populated by politically powerless people, will have been ravaged. The same is true of the Derry proposals, but of course, no-one would propose wind-farms off the North Down Coast, or off the Dublin coastline, or the fifty miles of gusty ridgeland along the Sussex Downs. The presence of a wind-farm is proof of local impotence (apart, that is, from owners of hill-tops, who receive handsome rent) and remoteness from the decision-making process.
Wind certainly won’t reduce our CO2 emissions. If that’s what we want to do, we can either go back to the dark ages, or we can use nuclear power. Those are the real options if we think CO
2 is a threat to the planet, and there aren’t any others. And the choice can be made only after an informed debate, not the effusions of pious prattle which the environment generally provokes among the bien-pensant in this country.
I think one thing we’re going to have to get used to is the fact that many of these massive developments are likely to be scaled back very significantly or not built at all because of the economic climate.
I doubt the rental situation and so on would be near as good as has been over recent years.
I can’t imagine this being built like this, when so much time has passed.How much money has already been wasted on this thing? How much did the pool out there cost to build and what purpose does it now serve? How much will the FAI be able to sue the government for – Eircom Park could have been built by now and at a fraction of the price? The worst thing about this fiasco is that a fortune has already been spent and once again we have absolutely nothing to show for it.
At least the Spike will be built, the foundations are already in place and it can only be a matter of a couple of months now.
