Two stories caught my eye earlier in the week – one in the Irish Times and the one in the London Times. The Irish Times informed me that improvements could be made to Dublin’s city centre by way of a plaza. Of course the cost increase was the first thing mentioned.
The budget, we are told, for Dublin’s College Green civic plaza has “soared to €80 million, an increase of €70 million since the scheme was last submitted for planning permission eight years ago.”
The project to create a traffic-free plaza is also facing additional lengthy delays with completion unlikely before the end of this decade, Dublin City Council officials have said. What happened is that a design for a smaller plaza was submitted in 2018 but refused because of the impact on bus services. Now the main bus services will be routed away from the centre so we might get a bigger and better bus and cycle free zone (cycle terrorists are worse than cars). We could have a real fancy plaza for 80 million Euros. That’s cheap if you ask me.
They are talking shovels in the ground in 2027 and a three year construction project. The 80 million price tag includes a contingency fee. We all know that even with a “huge contingency fee” of “about 40 per cent” it will go over 80 million. And I say – so what. Do it.
I have been back in this fair island for 2 years and my visits to the city centre could be counted on one hand. The northside of Dublin has been surrendered to criminality. This listener to Newstalk gave this description. “Yesterday around 1 o’clock, I was parked on O’Connell Bridge at the traffic lights and what I saw was absolutely horrific,” he said. “Drug dealing, drug taking, everyone walking around the bridge like zombies. Tourists trying to get a picture of the Ha’Penny Bridge and getting disturbed and hassled. It was just a horrible thing to see.” Embarrassing is what it is.
The southside – where I was last week – could be better. This is supposed to be the showcase of the capital city.
What readers must understand before the penny pinching gets the better of you is that what our politicians do or not do with communal public spaces tells you what they think if you – the voter. If they let the main thoroughfare of the city be taken over by criminals it’s because they think you and the voter are worthless and do not deserve a crime limited capital city.
Public spaces are shared amenities and if we don’t have any it means the politicians think you are just not worth having such an amenity. I can tell you now that if someone needed an IPAs centre in College Green that bad boy would be up there before you could say, exceeds budget.
The only real communal space in the southside of Dublin in St Stephen’s Green. This is also one of the few green spaces in Dublin. This is another big bug-bear of mine. From looking at the plans of this plaza they have not put in enough trees. It is simply not green enough.
If I had my way, I’d stick a small playground in there, just so we have our priorities right. There is a larger playground in St Stephen’s green, a smaller one could be put on the other side of Grafton Street. We need more benches and unless I am wrong Ireland can be rainy so some shelter is needed, either by way of trees or something else. Just paving the whole place and adding a few not very attractive ultra-modern benches is not going to cut it. If you do that, it just attracts the ne’er-do-well. Oxford Street in London, which has also been handed over to petty criminals is to be pedestrianised. It might be worth considering what the plans for that project are.
Many people are under the delusion that Ireland is very green. Ireland has a lot of farmland, which cannot be accessed by the public. So it might be green but it is not green in the sense that people can access woodland or parks or small urban gardens in its cities. There are some of these – although no National Trust system – but there should be more.
The new schools down my way have neither a blade of grass nor a single tree. Why? Why do they do this.? I am sorry to be so negative but some of them look like young offenders institutions not schools. Indeed Trinity College has seen fit to put up a building that looks like a place you would incarcerate students rather than educate them. I’m convinced they do this just to annoy me.
I am going to do that really annoying thing and bring in a comparison to London, which is silly given the size differences but there we are. London is a much greener city with a lot more parks, including very small ones you barely notice. Victoria Embankment Gardens, pictured below, is particularly nice but I have spotted more and more tiny urban gardens which absolutely could be introduced in Dublin. Urban dwellers, especially children, should have access to green spaces, even small ones. Speaking of London, do you know what they are getting, for half of the 80 million quid? A few statues. They don’t think twice about spending money on that kind of thing.
TFL (Transport for London) will already have extended various tube lines and completed cross rail and the Elizabeth line while Dublin is still waiting on its Metro. I complained about that here. Well now a statue depicting the late Queen on horseback alongside the Mall and another of her walking arm-in-arm with Prince Philip are part of a winning design selected for a national memorial to Elizabeth II as reported in the Times.
A new Prince Philip Gate in St James’s Park and a translucent bridge inspired by the late Queen’s wedding tiara will also be built. A wind sculpture will be included in the park to “define a space for reflection and shared experience”, while Elizabeth’s voice will be “ever present through audio installations”. Between £23 million and £46 million has been set aside for the project. They have left themselves a fair bit of wriggle room there alright but this is the kind of thing the Brits are willing to spend their money on.
Personally I could do without the hideous wind sculpture and I think a single memorial to the late Queen is enough along with the bridge which looks beautiful. But the point is the 80 million Euros for a communal space in the heart of Dublin city is money well spent. The British have huge underlying economic problems (GDP shrunk by 0.3% in April) and I don’t remember them begging Apple to take back tax revenue, yet they still spend money on public works.
So there we are. If the Irish government could take time out of their busy diaries obsessing over Israel and whacking up IPAS centres all over the place maybe they could do some administrating. They could do some governing of the country they were actually elected to govern which should include claiming back the city centre from the drug dealers as well as improving the transport system and creating beautiful public spaces, for you ordinary joe public.
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