MT

That’s interesting Sean. I noticed the join with the tarmac but thought that was some sort of filler independent of what seemed like a cobble lock surface. But even this mediocre finish would surely be much more preferable to the egregious poured concrete so popular with local authorities down there.

His practice did a development plan for Tipperary town in the early 1980s and found that in the previous 25 years, only six or seven private houses had been built in the town compared with 240 local authority houses: all of the private housing was over a mile outside the town.

“We have got to give people an incentive – through good housing – to move back into towns,” he says, adding that most people would prefer to live in a community.

In his booklet, Living Over the Shop – Relief From The Long Commute, launched yesterday, he argues that in Ireland there is “an increasing social divide between the town and the surrounding area, with higher income households tending to be located in the surrounds of the towns and lower income households in the town”.

I think the bit above from the article is worth repeating – so many of Ireland’s towns are turning into minaturised versions of American doughnut cities. Those that could afford it left for their ‘rural’ idyll while the lower rungs of society were left behind. If you compare the likes of Sligo and Enniskillen you can even see a contrast in the extent of this phenomenon across the border.

The former has gone beyond urban sprawl with the surrounding countryside now filled with McMansions and villas leaving large parts of the town dead and even derelict. Development around Enniskillen has been much more tightly controlled with the slow release of land for expanding suburbs and comparatively few one-offs. This has still resulted in urban sprawl but unlike Sligo the town in much more compact and this shows in every way. There’s far more new development in the town, there’s fewer endless stretches of suburbanised road to maintain and so the public space within the town has been afforded much more attention. All in all Enniskillen is compact, well kept and thriving: Sligo seems to have been let go terribly for seemingly no other reason than enabling the socially mobile to bugger off to the nearest hilltop. 🙁

Ireland in general, but the west of the Republic in particular, seems to have become so anti town. As for villages, they’re a long lost cause in the likes of Donegal were so many are now largely derelict.

The old and the new in Melbourne.

A fantastic piece of restoration. The original architectural failings aside (although I think some are being a bit harsh) Dublin’s centrepiece has been given a sparkling makeover. This project by An Post really has been from the top drawer and ties in beautifully with the O’C street redevelopment. There can be no doubt Dublin has been truly transformed over the last decade.

@GregF wrote:

A carving of a harp and a shield with the crest s of the 4 provinces could be apt to fill the spot.

Not so sure. The irony of such a feature wouldn’t be lost on a large section of one of those provinces after the recent riots on the street. Though a fairly dodgy bunch, the common reaction of ‘if they love it so much can’t they stay up there’ to the Love Ulster (were they even the main organiser) march would suggest that most Dubliners would prefer a shield consisting of three segments not four. And the remarks from some would indicate that a removal of a certain orange stripe from the national flag mightn’t be the most unpopular move ever made either!

Disclaimer: before I start a riot (sorry, had to get that in) in response to that comment, I’ll just point out that although from the North, I’m not an Orange bastard, a protestant fundamentalist nut case, religious at all indeed, a nazi, a bigot, a British imperialist, a racist, an anti-Irish git, thick, moustachioed, a supremacist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, an ‘if it wasn’t for that lot, everything would be rosy’ person, someone that ties up swings on a Sunday, a loyalist murderer, wearing union jack underpants, dour, difficult, humourless and just plain nasty or even someone who doesn’t consider themselves Irish. Or any other stereotypes I’ve missed. Just an architecture enthusiast who happens to live in the wrong province, or so it seems.

Still, the GPO looks wonderful. 🙂

Those churches are beautiful. The setting of St Peter and Paul’s off Patrick streat is fantastic: it’s like something out of a mediterranean hill town, with a narrow street hiding such a large and intricate structure. One of the misfortunes of being brought up a protestant (Anglican) is that you just don’t get to experience such sumptuous interiors. And that’s even with Anglican churches being the least dreary of the various prod denominations. I’ve been in one or two Free P churches and they’d make a bus shelter look like an architectural masterpiece. Sangallo, do you know of any E.W. Pugin churches in Northern Ireland? Did he do any work outside of Ireland/Britain?

I’m no environmentalist buts what is happening in Ireland now has turned me into a bit of a green. The one off housing blight is quite simply horrendous. It’s becoming an increasing problem here in Northern Ireland but seems to be at a much more advanced stage in the Republic. Places such as Donegal – which people in Belfast have shamefully contributed to with their holiday ‘villas’ – has been nothing short of ruined by such development. Houses seem to stream out like the strands of a spider’s web for miles along every road leaving towns and villages. Very soon the entire county will have become a low density suburb of higgledy-piggledy one-offs plonked along every lane and over every hill-top. It’s environmental vandalism on gigantic scale. And if NI and the rest of the south are going to end up looking like the Donegal-sprawl (it even rhymes:o ) then I’ll simply emigrate.

At the current rate Ireland is going to end up as one of the most spoilt and downright ugly environments in Europe. Indeed, just compare this place to the island next door. There, towns and villages stop at clear boundaries and beautiful rolling countryside is left unspoilt in between. Indeed, I’d go as far to say that if we have to have a choice between sprawl at the edge of towns and cities and the McMansion blitz the former is vastly preferable. Yes, some countryside would be lost but not on the scale that the current low density carpet-bombing is wreaking. Indeed, if you rounded up all the one-offs to be built across the Republic over the next ten years and placed them in a dense thin circle around the various large cities most of the country would remain verdant and unscathed.

But why is it that Irish people – North and South – seem to have no sense of the common good when it comes to the environment like the Scottish, English, Dutch, Germans and almost everyone else in Europe? Why have we treated this island’s stunning natural heritage with the contempt that’s so evident in the ribbons of bungalows and valleys speckled in mock Tudor mansions? Such permanent disfigurement is not just disgusting but immoral IMO.

Not wishing to be petty but one thing I will add is that our one-offs seem to be better integrated with the landscape than yours – if that’s possible. (You know we’ve really reached the bottom of the barrel when the state of our respective sprawls becomes a pissing contest :rolleyes: ) But anyway, when recently travelling to Donegal I deliberately drove up a few house lined rural roads in Fermanagh simply for comparison’s sake. The differences while small in print had quite a substantial effect on the ground. On our side of the border, the one-offs were set further back from the roads edge, hill-side and hill-top sites had clearly been placed off-limits (indeed the planners had often steered development into much less obtrusive hollows) and there were no boundary walls with hedge and wooden fence used instead. Indeed, the original roadside shrub had often been retained. Furthermore, there was considerably greater spacing between the sites. All of this seemed to combine to soften the impact of the sprawl.

Then came Donegal.

Hill-side, hill-top and anywhere you want seemingly. For that matter it appeared that planners had deliberately steered builders away from less damaging locations. Houses are often so close together as to seem almost piled on top of each other. Almost every one has a disproportionately large boundary wall that’s often completely out of character with the property. Frequently these are placed at all sorts of different angles destroying the continuity of the road verge and furthermore they quite often lie unfinished or poorly maintained. Then there’s the thing which has been banned in NI and that’s ribbon development along major roads. This surely must add to the accident rate. Accordingly, I propose the incorporation of a new town in Donegal – N56ville. This ‘linear’ settlement begins at Donegal town (now seemingly a commuter village of the former) and continues seemingly without end. It must have the longest high-street in Europe.

The other feature which we seem to have avoided up here but one which Donegal has managed to turn into a recurring speciality is the isolated housing estate. In NI most housing estates tend to be in or attached to towns but that’s not how they do things in Donegal. Oh no, housing estates there tend to get thrown up in fields in the middle of nowhere. You turn a corner and are confronted with a little oasis of 20 or so semi-ds all on their lonesome surrounded by cow pats and the distant shimmer of the expanse of one-offs.

Letterkenny isn’t so much a town as an explosion: like something that hurtled from outer space and was splattered over the county’s northern landscape. Towns like this tend to follow you around – usually to the next village and beyond. I imagine that there’ll come a time when Letterkenny will spread its tentacles of ribbon development to every nook and cranny in the county.

If this sort of development is replicated all along the western sea-board then how unearth will the government’s proposed west coast railway line ever be feasible. The trains won’t be running from one concentrated urban core to another but simply through a sparsely populated splurge.

Ireland is being destroyed – and it’s all very depressing. In the space of a generation this island will have went from containing some of the most outstanding landscapes in Europe to some of the most disfigured. If you’re in any doubt take a trip to the mess that is the trip to Malin Head. In England or Scotland the area would’ve been preserved unspoilt as a national park. But here in Ireland the development that’s been allowed to go on there is nothing short of sickening.

Welcome to the Ireland of tomorrow: the ugly isle.

A bit OT, but as you’ve a keen interest in road development you might be interested in the following forum, Dave.

http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk

It seems to cater for both British and Irish roads.

I agree with what people are saying about the need for a change in attitude. However, I still believe that the state of the built environment also contributes to such lax attitudes towards littering.

If streets are well finished and kept clean then they’ll invite less litter. I mean, most people have few doubts about dropping rubbish on waste ground – so the less streets look dilapidated and decrepit the greater the chance people won’t behave as if they were on a derelict building site.

In this respect, I feel the state of footpaths leaves something to be desired down south. In most cases they’re finished in unmatched chunks of concrete which then proceed to crack and chip as well as collecting a brownish grime in our damp climate. The end result is hideous. I was in Howth recently and this nice little place is really let down by the acres of grime coloured concrete footpaths everywhere. If tarmac or good paving had been used the appearance of the streetscape would have been transformed. Tarmac due to its dark finish doesn’t show up dirt half as much giving an area a cleaner feel.

Having said that, even where tarmac is used down there the choice of material is inadequate. Southern councils seem to use the fragile stuff which unless driven on frequently allows weeds to sprout up through it. Pavements need to be in many ways even more durable as there’s no traffic to press the surface down. The result in many cases is a fairly recent footpath cracking up due to weeds coming up. Again, it creates such an unkempt appearance. And that’s another thing, many councils in the south could do with getting out the weed killer more often – weeds and tufts of grass seem to have taken over many public spaces.

In general I’d say the look of streetscapes would be greatly improved if far less concrete was used for footpaths and the ubiquitous walls that seem to barricade everything. Where fancy paving materials are too costly – such as in residential areas – the solution in NI now seems to be to use robust and high quality tarmac. This and more weeding would work wonders down there.

It won’t change the behaviour of the worst litter lout but surely a well finished and well maintained street environment will cause many to think twice before treating it as a bin.