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Clearly sophisticated argument isn’t your strong suit, Thomond, if you can’t see why I would declaim the destruction of Archer’s Garage, and refuse to be outraged by a motorway that will bring relief to thousands of people in Meath being built at some distance from a hill that has only mythical associations.
no such word as “troll” in my dictionary. clearly you have to make stuff up as you go along
No, there’s no Pauline conversion here. I appreciate fine buildings and I am as appalled as anyone else when a historic or architecturally important building is razed. However I am not a NIMBY. Most development is good and a lot of opposition to it is thoughtless.
I just feel this site is getting off the point. Instead of discussing architecture (good and bad) it’s getting bogged down in conservation and anti-roads issues. What does the M3 and Tara debate have to do with architecture anyway?
What a bunch of loony lefty tweedy conservation types infest this site. I think you’d all be better moving over to the An Taisce chatboard. This is supposed to be an architecture site – and you can’t build stuff without either knocking other stuff down or “destroying” a previously pristine landscape
They’re totally comparable. A motorway has one extra lane. So it’s nothing like comparing a three-storey with a high rise
So the whole centre of Ireland has to be preserved? Give me a break, the road goes nowhere near the Hill of Tara. The current N3 is far closer
And who is the “they” in the title of this thread? Why do people forever attribute conspiracies to some vague “they” as if the people have no control of their own destinities. Most people actually want the M3 where it is, which is why it’s being built there.
As the people of France have just shown, “we” are in charge not “they”. Vive la revolution. On with the road building!!!!
SO what the hell was all the fuss about…. one coffee shop replaces another, and gets lots of free publicity in the process. No more than the independence of Ireland in 1922, when the postboxes changed from red to green, nothing of significance has happened her. One crowd of coffee-selling capitalists has replaced another, and suckered a lot of people into giving them business in the process.
Yes but Paul, what kind of precedent would it send if the government was to say: “this is the best route for the M3, but because environmental nutters are going to make our lives a misery for the next five years and delay the project in the courts, we’re going to move it elsewhere.” It would be a huge victory for the anti-road lobby, without them having to spend a penny or a day in court, and it would fuel their campaigns against other bypasses and motorways.
No, let them do their worst in court. A la Carrickmines and Glen of the Downes, the road will get built in the end and by-passing motorists will wonder what the hell the fuss was ever about
In relation to the 26 archaeological sites of interest, the question is how important are any of them? Should the march of a nation be held up because a Celt once sharpened a stone in a particular field? I think a site should be more than just “of interest” before a lot of money is spent excavating it…
this is snobbery:
Phil: those sorts of developments are constructed with one type of person in mind: the sort that likes to avoid the realities of both country and city living, but have the benefits of both. By closing themselves off in to a little enclave where they encounter …… (blah blah)
How do you know what sort of person is going to buy that house? Stereotyping people should have no place on a website dedicated to critiquing architecture.
To get back to the original issue though, my understanding is that there is a real fear in old cemetries that ancient headstones will topple over and kill people, especially children. There’s been a few cases of this in other countries, and you can imagine the compensation payment/insurance nightmare that arises. So any cemetery manager is duty bound to do something about dangerous headstones that are liable to topple over.
However, I’ve also heard there’s some legal situation, whereby if a cemetery manager repairs one headstone, he is suddenly liable for every single one in the whole graveyard. So what they do is, take the dangerous headstone down, and if no-one comes to claim it in a reasonable time (and these are generally very old, so no one does) then they cart if off.
Without playing the part of Paul Bearer here, I don’t really think that cemetries are exactly money spinning operations. think about it – you sell a plot of land for a few hundred euro, and that’s it gone forever. not like other products where you sell the same thing back to people over and over again. (Unless you lot believe in reincarnation!) :rolleyes:
yeah, fair point. maybe councils should decide that these things aren’t worth it anymore, though. there was a case in the past that the public needed to make emergency calls to the cops or whatever; that need doesn’t exist. the only people that use them now are crims who don’t want to leave traces
all public jacks should be pulled down while they’re at it. dublin is disfigured with them e.g. the one in the centre of terenure village, the one at mount jerome cemetry… is that one still there opposite Trinity?
All telephone kiosks should now be removed around Ireland. No one needs them any more. We use our mobiles. They are just targets for vandals, and invariably unsightly heaps of broken glass and rubbish.
That’s a very selective list of 13 projects, and I think, Greg, you’ve set out to prove the glass is half-empty. Taking a starting point of 1995 (the birth of the Celtic Tiger), you could include a lot of other things that have been done, such as the redevelopment of Dublin docklands, the new library in TCD, the national gallery extension, the aquatic centre, the M1 motorway, the bypassing of Kildare and points west, etc.
Yes things do take ages, but the more considered approach sometimes work. Do we really need a Metro? Does anyone other than Michael O’Leary really think that a second terminal in Dublin Airport is essential? on the Abbey, for example, far better to take ages and get it right than rush into another mistakeO’Donoghue had abit more to say about all this in the Sunday Times at the weekend. Interestingly, he raised the prospect of the GPO as a possible home for the Abbey. Smacked of desperation…. isn’t the building too shallow?
Once his department finds a suitable site, that signature building will be erected and will house the Abbey, the minister says. But, bizarrely in a city that has an abundance of derelict sites and unused buildings, the task of finding a site has so far defied O’Donoghue.
His officials now have a shortlist of three — Colaiste Mhuire on Parnell Square, the hideous Hawkins House (which would be razed and rebuilt) and Infirmary Road. Colaiste Mhuire should have been declared the winner in time for the Abbey’s 100th birthday, but the party was ruined by the refusal of businessmen who own part of the Parnell Square site to sell to the state at a “reasonable” price.
“People have to realise that while the state will do everything it possibly can to be reasonable, we cannot be unreasonable to the taxpayers,” says O’Donoghue. “We don’t have unlimited resources and we are not in the business of enriching people who happen to own property which we might require.
“It is unfortunate that I do not have any powers of compulsory acquisition, because if I did, it would be open to me to tell the owners of 1 Granby Row that if you won’t give it to me at the market value, well then I will take it at the the market value.”
So what is the next act in the Abbey drama? “We have two sites in the melting pot — Infirmary Road and Hawkins House, headquarters of the Department of Health, where there have been many great performances over the years,” he quips. “The Office of Public Works will look at the possibility of accommodating the Abbey theatre at the Colaiste Mhuire site, but I told them I am not interested unless we can accommodate the brief that we have.
“What is important is to get a site at market value. I’ve a feeling that it may well be possible for us to put our theatre at Hawkins House. There are other possibilities which could be looked at — such as the GPO. I haven’t even investigated it, but it definitely has more than the square footage that might be required.”
Kefu is right – this isn’t journalism, it’s a rant. One example from many possible – Toyota in Tralee isn’t just selling cars, it’s “doing its bit to inflate the car economy”. Imagine coming to Ireland and depending on Ian Lumley, Eamonn Ryan and Tony Lowes to tell you what’s happening? It’s like going to Britain and speaking to Screaming Lord Sutch, Arthur Scargill and Billy Bragg.
A lot of these liberal Brits want Ireland to stay a backward “pleasant” country where they can shoot and fish during the summer. We’re not allowed to have roads, Tralee isn’t to have Toyotas, and bogs are to be left alone and just looked at. What a lot of twaddle. Amazed that a serious newspaper could publish such a one-sided view. 😡
That bloke had a point about Merrion Square – or Dr Dermot Ryan park to give its proper title (caught me out in a pub quiz one time, that one….) it’s a bit of a junkyard and repository for all sorts of garbage. That Oscar Wilde sculpture is rubbish for starters, and what’s Michael Collins’s bust doing sticking its Blueshirt head up in the middle of nowhere, no context, no explanation, just dumped there.
trace Saw Paul Quilligan in his white Bewley’s hard hat fighting the good fight on Sky TV last night.
who’s Paul Quilligan?
