murphaph
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Isn’t the redevelopment of Parnell Sq. a little premature given that we are now in the Transport21 ‘era’ and the Luas route to Broadstone may well go right up O’Connell Street onto Parnell Sq., Granby Row, Western Way and into Broadstone Station to acess the old MGWR alignment that will take the tram on to Liffey Junction (and maybe Finglas post T21)? Should the city council not hold off on this until the Luas route is decided or in place? The Luas link up is likely to be route ‘A’ at this stage and that will make a continuation up O’Connell Street quite possible.
@Cute Panda wrote:
It had to be sacrificed to – it was “a Dublin Mindset”.
Could you imagine if a Dublin poltician went down to Clare and told them that their road deaths are high and the tourists are staying away from your county because of a “rural mindset” – there would be murder and yet people in Dublin watched a budget speech delivered by a Minister of Finance which attacks people in Dublin in a bigoted manner as if was his patriotic duty, while Farmer Bertie sitting there beside this gobshite nodding in agreement.
McCreevy is the rural Finance Minister who for almost 4 years withheld the money needed for the Dublin Metro, Interconnector and Luas extenions treating them as if they were luxury projects, while at the same time he threw cash at the horsey crowd.
You just couldn’t make this stuff up even if you tried.
Too painfully true. I drive past McCreevy’s gaf near Sallins sometimes (all horsey set neighbours round there so no surprises he gave them a heap of cash for their centre in Punchestown). What an eyesore. Typically out of place 6,000 sq ft monstrosity, along with it’s equally out of place neighbours, all put up in the last decade (ruining a previously peaceful and idyllic place) on a single track lane that has to be maintained at the expense of urban dwellers who have to pay the same tax as the one-off dwellers who destroy more road in their Pajero’s in a week than an urban dweller does in a year. Yet it’s the urban dwellers who are spoiled, or so we are continually told from across the Shannon.
@PDLL wrote:
Fine. Then lets just continue to build Dublin up. Lets just cram it till it bursts.
Did I say that? I said the cities should be developed, including Galway and Limerick.
@PDLL wrote:
Lest just heap one problem on top of another. Lets just make the traffic jams longer, the buses more crowded, property more expensive and so on until you have the urban living nightmare that is something like Birmingham or London. Maybe – just maybe – then a select group of Dubliners might just stop whining that the west is getting some badly needed political and financial attention because they will be so busy whining about all of the new problems that they have to contend with. If you are going to base the development of the nation (in case you forgot, there are 25 other counties in the Republic) on petty bigotry then I truly feel sorry for the country.
I’m no biggot, believe me. I have time for everyone, but if you choose to live in rural Ireland then don’t expect the infrastructure to be built around you. If you choose to live in urban Ireland you have a right to expect a certain level of infrastructure to be provided for you. Simple. As CP says, Dublin (and Cork, Limerick and Galway) is woefully underpopulated while there are people living in low density rural and suburban sprawl all over the land. Thankfully, most recent development in Dublin has been medium density at least. This is the way to go, build up the cities and have very prohibitive restrictions on low density and particularly one-off (except urban infill) housing to prevent the further destruction of the irish countryside, which as CP says, belongs to all of us, not just the farmers to sell it off one third of an acre at a time.
@PDLL wrote:
And if you think towns like Sligo are developing, then you really need to travel around a bit more often.
I said Sligo shouldbe developed, as per the NSS. It isn’t being deveoped because politicians like Tom Parlon are popular because they support houses all over the place and ‘decentralistion’ to every twi bit village in the country, as opposed to proper decentralistion whereby certain towns are picked and developed. The NSS is dead and it was a good idea.
@Thomond Park wrote:
One could take another view that South Wales has little in the way of tall buildings and that the flight path touches West Cork and little else.
An interesting recladding all the same.
What height is the tallest building on the island of Ireland? Is the Europa in Belfast not pretty tall? (memories of IRA bombings in the bleak 80’s popping into my head now)
PDLL-The anglo-normans (lets call a spade a spade, the brits) did not ‘pick’ Dublin. The Vikings had established a trading city there hundreds of years beforehand because Dublin is close to Europe.
Now, you give it the usual “balanced regional develoment” routine. The fact is that we should not ‘spread investment thinly’ in all corners of the land. We should pick cities and develop them (a la the doomed NSS-doomed because it dared to ignore some real two-bit towns in rural Ireland in favour of places like Sligo), not allow further low density, unsustainable sprawl.
Fair play to An Taisce for objecting to yet another blot on the landscape in Leitrim. It’s high time these joke county councils were told what to do (unfortunately Dick Roche told them to do the wrong thing to get FF votes). The west’s latest whinge is that tourism is Dublin centric. That’s because the old allure of the west is gone-all the natural beauty has been stadily destroyed by one off housing and now visitors are failing t return. Why would they? They can see suburbia in Croydon/Basildon/Wilmslow, they don’t need to pay to see it all over Mayo. Of course the western tourism agency is blaming a lack of funding on advertising and not the destruction of the once beautiful landscape. At least here in the East we have Wicklow Co Co protecting the beautiful garden of Ireland a hell of a lot better than Mayo Co Co-try to build a one off house in Wicklow and see how far you get. Wicklow realised that tourism in the county depends on natural beauty and has acted accordingly. Even Fingal where tourism is not important (apart from the Airport), you can not build a one-off house to save your life. Fingal realised some time ago that Balbriggan, Swords and Blanchardstown should be developed as “county towns” and the countrysideshould be preserved. Clare co co were publically admonished by the NRA (and thretened with funding withdrawal!) for persisting with granting planning on one off housing within 100m of national roads in the counrty. Backward mindset, victim complex, coupled to an electoral system that underrepresents the urban areas and over represents the rural areas (beacuse every constituency has minimum 3 seats under the constitution, regardless of how small the population!).
CP, you’re meeting that wailing wall that is the western mentality (not the mentality of everyone from the west before I’m accused of being a british colonialist loving protestant supremacist!) right here.
Reality check people-there are NO major cities on the western seaboard. I’m not talking in Indian or Chinese terms, I’m talking in British Isles terms. A ‘city’ like Galway could well not even get a motorway connection because it’s population is simply not big enough. Norwich for example has no motorway connection. Norwich is bigger than Galway and Limerick people.
This may seem OT but it’s not really. The OP was querying why Ballymun ‘failed’ and the neglect of our cities in favour of rural utopias is very much on topic here.
@Bren88 wrote:
Did you honestly consider that I was claiming that it’s good to see what has been dumped into the river. My point was that raising the level like that would hide the current rubbish. And due to some of the lower bridges, the level could only be raise to a point. But all the crap would continue to build up.
Fair enough, it wasn’t clear from your post is all. So the river needs more regular dredging, on that we’re agreed I presume.
@Bren88 wrote:
The idea would help with the unsightly stains and mud. But all the dam would achieve would be a consent high tide liffey. And the current liffey is still very far from beautiful at high tide. The river is better at high tide, but I would find it hard to believe that the average high tide could “encourage people to take in the liffey”.
Not in isolation, but coupled with the boardwalks and good weather, then yes, as the primary factor in people balking at the river is the stench in summer during low tides. Eliminate the push factor before creating pull factors that can’t do anything about the smell at the precise time of year that you want to maximise the river’s potential-peak tourist season.
@Bren88 wrote:
It wouldn’t really solve it, it would only hide it. So various crap would still end up in there, and the extent would not be known. And the water traffic would suffer from it.
The worst problem is the awful stench from the decomposing mud in the summer. The weir would solve that. Your point makes little sense to me, it seems to claim that it’s good to know what sort of material has been dumped into the Liffey, even though no attempt is made to removed the stuff-lots of rivers aren’t tidal and are probably full of shopping trolleys and it doesn’t cause a major problem, though I’m not encouraging the disposal of anything into a waterway! The weir would kill the smell off and encourage more people to take in the river and let it return to prominance in our city, and that’s good enough reason to spend €30m in my book.
Excellent thread-hi Thomas! Good to see you giving your perspectives here. I find myself in total agreement with you (not for the first time). I’ve had just about all that I can take of the ‘rural’, must have ‘balanced regional development’ rubbish which is basically an urban-hating agenda, you’re spot on with that. I point you to a picture I took the other day for a roads webiste I frequent-it was taken in darkest North Kildare, that bastion of the irish language :rolleyes:
It typifies the rural/gaelgoir BS we have shoved down our throats by the likes of Eamon O’Cuiv. I say we form the Liga Est, viva la revolution! Idyllic rural Ireland can fend for it’s idyllic self. No offence to anyone from outside the Pale btw, it’s the mentality of the ‘architects of Irish society’ I have a problem with, not the good folks of Mayo or wherever!Well worth the investment IMO. The Lagan Weir demonstrates how effective such a scheme would be. Dublin would benefit even more than Belfast as the river runs rith through the city centre. See here also.
@Graham Hickey wrote:
🙁
A sorry sight indeed. And you’d have to wonder how a post box can just lose its door like that :rolleyes:
Anyone detecting a slight South-North bias in the restoration of the city’s pillar boxes? From Fitzwilliam Square to Kildare Street, to St. Stephen’s Green, to the Stillorgan dual-carriageway I noted today – all beautifully finished or primed. Yet Talbot Street, the closest street in all of Dublin with pillar boxes to the GPO has its pillars in their usual shameful decrepit state.
And these are decent specimens, not the plasticy muck you see elsewhere around the city.Well the box refered to in the OP is on the northside and has been lovingly repainted with it’s final coat. I passed by it today and it really jumped out at me how well it looked. Hopefully the whole lot are being done. Anyone ever see the green box on the Falls Rd? It’s gas the way the locals have painted it!
The huge neon Guinness sign atop their tall white building as you travel citybound along chesterfield avenue at dusk-wonderful sight all lit up in red! Ah, thank you google-here’s the sign during daylight hours…
I like concrete. It’s hardwearing, provides excellent grip when laid properly, does not allow weeds to take hold, easy to repair so that the repair matches perfectly (after an initial weathering period), cheap and I actually like the material itself. Concrete is thousands of years old with a great history, why clad every pavement in cobblelock? I would not like Asphalt pavements as there is little contrast between pavement and roadway as provided with other materials. Badly laid concrete footpaths of course look dreadful. I think coblelock has it’s uses, especially in important civic spaces and so on, but this is just a standard road junction in a fairly nondescript part of town.
@dodger wrote:
It was McSharry’s cutbacks that kickstaarted the economy not a cash splurge.
Ah come on, the economy was kickstarted because of a number of things. These include massively increased investment in Telecom Eireann to convert the trunk channels to all digital, investment in the RTC system (the so called binary education system-Universities and Technical Colleges working together to deliver graduates) and the lowering of corporate tax rates, not forgetting the finance act, 1987 (the legal basis for the IFSC was in that).
Lots of countries have cut spending-don’t see a wirtschafstwunder in many of them though!
@dodger wrote:
Within ten years we’ll have motorway / dual carriageway from Dublin to Cork and Galway. Perhaps this isn’t quick enough for you and perhaps we’re not the industrial powerhouse of Europe that Germany was but one thing we are not and that is pathetic. We are a country will full employment and working flat our in terms of infrastructure.
Have you ever heard of the National Development Plan, 2000-2006? That was supposed to see the roads you mention already completed. I admire your optimism, however Ireland is pathetic in many ways, most notably the ability to complete major infrastructure projects. The green white and orange tinted sunglasses can’t mask it.
I think we need to remember that a city is a living breathing thing and therefore a degree of compromise wrt ‘views’ and so on will always be necessary. The live wires and associated supported wires on the Luas are a lot less intrusive than many older installations in other European cities.
When you’re standing looking at a feature building your brain can disregard things like wires, they can’t be seen in the same light as say the loop line bridge which really does obstruct views.
Personally I can’t wait for trams across O’Connell Bridge and up the street and I don’t consider myself an arcitectural heathen or anything 🙂 Get the cars out of the city centre north-south axis and you’re in business for a very pedestrian fiendly city core.
Just a quick couple of points,
A version of the Citadis tram (the one we use) can run without overhead cables, instead relying on a conducting track running between the rails, underneath the vehicle. It is constructed in short sections that only energise when a tram is covering them, meaning they are quite safe to step on otherwise! I think Lyon uses this system in it’s visually important areas and then the trams switch to overhead supply in other places.
Personally I like tram wires, but I’m odd like that and I don’t feel that College Green should be preserved like a huge outdoor museum piece, the tram returning to Dublin is living history so I don’t feel it’s a bad thing to erect what are pretty thin cables overhead, they can of course be strung from supporting wires, attached to buildings such as Trinity and the BoI, eliminating the need for poles, but then again-we have umpteen poles in the form of lampstandards there already, so what’s the difference-the tram poles in the old days used to support the street lights too, maybe if poles are used they could be dual purposed like the original system.
I think an area like College Green will actually benefit from the trams running through.
A all the way. If we try to get the link-up to do too many things and serve too many places it will be a joke. We know a stretch of line is to go from the city centre to Broombride via Broadstone under T21, so let the green line run Sandyford (Cherrywood) – Broombridge (where interchange with Maynooth-Bray DART will be possible) via Route A and a continuation straight up O’Connell St. Under T21 the interconnector at Stephen’s Green will make many of the reasons for running this line via Pearse redundant, so we’ve got to view everyhing in context of T21 and beyond and not try to do to much with one mode.
Anytime I’ve been to Glasgow I always felt it to be a bigger city than Dublin, with a higher density of population in the areas surrounding the central business district (which feels a lot bigger than Dublin’s). Particularly notable I think is the number of tenements that are fully occupied. A lot of ‘over the shop’ accomodation that would be occupied in Glasgow is still vacant in Dublin. I think the city council has some action plan to address that but I culd be mistaken.
