Letters to the Editor: Sad to think of the shops long gone from Cork's St Patrick’s Street
A 1978 The Hands Yesteryear Litany As Stock Businesses Street In Picture: Cork, Shop Patrick's Of Munster St Of New By Archive Arcade Examiner Changed Reader's This The In Owners, Off Sold After January, Photo A Penney's, Of Was Irish The On Recalled Taken One Sister
My elder sister visited her favourite street, St Patrick’s Street, the heart of her beloved Cork, last week.
Although very young at heart, she rarely visits the city centre but decided to get the bus in to town to do some early Christmas shopping and to get stamps in the GPO.
She has been visiting St Patrick’s Street since she was a child, and vividly relives the excitement of all the lovely shops and restaurants: The Tivoli Restaurant, Roche’s Stores, Cash’s, Egan’s, Woolworth’s, Cudmore’s, The Lee Cinema, The Savoy, The Pavilion, Saxone, The Munster Arcade, The Queen’s Old Castle, The Oyster, Moderne, The Old Bridge, The Swan and Cygnet — she never went there, does not know what she missed — Woodford Bourne’s, Dowden’s, The Green Door, Mockler’s, Gerald Barry’s, Bolger’s, The Victoria Hotel, Burton’s, The Vineyard, Day’s, Pigott’s Music Shop, Lester’s, Mangans, Thompson’s, Barter’s, Aer Lingus, Tung Sing, Ulster Bank, etc.
St Patrick’s Street used to be bursting with life!
The first place she dropped into was the GPO. She spent 25 minutes queueing up to post a parcel there. One teller and a big long queue. Then she walked up and down St Patrick’s Street and was dismayed at the lack of life. No atmosphere. Not very many people. A lot of sports shops replacing her favourite shops, (but better than being empty). Coming up to 3pm she began to feel uncomfortable and decided to get the bus home. “Next bus 32 minutes.” While waiting for the bus, she felt far from relaxed, people asking her for money, etc.
On the bus, she said to herself: “Why is Patrick’s Street becoming so void of the fun that it used to exude and why am I now so uncomfortable in the beautiful city that I used to be so proud of?”
This is the question I want Cork City Council to address before we allow that lovely street to become another O’Connell St, our capital’s main street, now in terminal decline.
Are Amazon, etc, at the heart of all this social dereliction? Are online companies at the heart of the dereliction in every village in Ireland? Sin é an ceist.
Act now before it is too late. We can all see what is happening. With online shopping ruling the day and drugs ruling the night, our main streets are suffocating. Bring back the Savoy! (No harm in dreaming.)
I read with interest of the plight of the service stations owner and his loss through theft (‘Fuel thefts of €40,000 a year at Limerick petrol station’ — Irish Examiner, November 11).
But whatever happened to service at petrol stations? Remember when there was an attendant who filled your car with the required amount ordered? And the attendant checked the oil and water, topping up where needed. The attendant also checked battery levels and added distilled water if necessary.
Now if enough profit could be made back then to pay an attendant, surely with the turnover now — with goods from wine gums to wine sold in the shops attached — could go some way to providing real service at service stations again.
The focus is too much on profit and service is self-service for which the customer doesn’t get paid — a bit like supermarket self checkout.
Regarding Sean O’Riordan’s article (‘Phenomenal’ number of drivers caught watching Netflix while behind wheel’ — Irish Examiner, November 11): This is crazy behaviour in light of all the information and safety campaigns that’s out there. This insane conduct is bewildering and perplexing especially in the context of increasing road deaths and all the conversations on television and radio programmes vis-à-vis road fatalities.
We are continually reading about the importance of having a duty of care apropos to driving on our roads. It’s incredulous to think that people who are equipped with all this information would then decide to sit behind the wheel of a car and make a decision that they must catch up on some series on Netflix while driving.
It’s also shocking to read that motorists have been detected having online meetings on their mobile phones, as well as interacting with others on social media platforms such as Facebook and X, while driving.
As a clinician, I have assisted many families who have lost loved ones.
It’s heartbreaking to see families trying to come to terms with the loss of a loved one, especially when it’s been caused by some selfish idiot who has no filter.
The only solution I can come up with is a name-and-shame policy for those who are caught transgressing the law apropos to the above. I believe that this would have to be buttressed by a lifetime ban from driving for anyone caught behind the wheel of a car engaging in these appalling and atrocious actions.
Mark Mohan (‘High-paying jobs are highly mobile’, Irish Examiner Letters, November 11) needs to change the record.
His oft-repeated fallacy, that if those with wealth are asked to pay a little more they will emigrate, causing the sky to fall on the rest of us, is getting tiresome.
There have been numerous attempts by advocates for the rich to put meat on this particular bone and all failed to come up with any convincing data to support the claim. What all such studies do show however is that the wealthy stay put and focus all their efforts on getting tax law changed to minimise their liability. Unfortunately, they are as good at this activity as they are at grabbing more than their fair share of the pie. The result is a deeply skewed distribution of wealth here and we suffer significant problems as a consequence. We are in desperate need of a fairer distribution of wealth and our tax policy should have that objective at its core. And the scale of the problem is enormous.
Oxfam recently compiled data from Forbes, Credit Suisse, and wealth data company Wealth-X which showed that the top 1% now holds €232bn — more than a quarter of Ireland’s wealth — while the top 10% owns close to a whopping two-thirds (64%) of the country’s wealth or €547bn. The most damning statistic shows the bottom 50% holds a paltry 1% or €9bn, which is less than the two
richest people combined (€15bn).
This state of affairs is created by government policy and accordingly can be fixed by policy. The real threat to the stability and wellbeing of our community is not what a small cohort of people with huge
incomes pay in income tax, but rather, the hugely disproportionate amount of the pie they are allowed to take. An income tax system that properly taxes wealth and high-end income is the most effective way to bring greater balance to how income is distributed. To quote Gandhi: “There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.”
Taoiseach Simon Harris is telling people not to vote for Independents, (‘Farmers told not to back Independents’ — Irish Examiner, November 13) but many people completely distrust parties after being let down on many key issues such as health, education and housing. Taxes such as Vat, LPT, TV, USC, and road taxes have never been more severe. We have to fork these out to pay for one of the most expensive countries in the EU and in the world for inadequate public services.
Our public dental system has completely collapsed, with hundreds of dentists leaving the medical card system every year. Thousands remain in worsening pain as they are forced to go private for advanced treatments and must get into debt because the government has not done enough or nothing at all to keep up with advanced treatments, beyond fillings and extraction to save teeth. Public transport is 50 years behind the times and services are inadequate.
Waiting lists for consultants stretch from here to the moon for public patients with a medical system which is trying to copy the US privatised medical system of profit before people.
Foreign direct investment is in the shape of fast food outlets which the Government is proud of so we end up with an obesity problem in a country already suffering from a weight management problem.
Housing is a complete failure brought about by pandering to special interests in the property sector which is about making a quick buck and not about housing people. Rents are out of control and rights regulation for tenants nowhere near what it should be.
Crime is a very big problem in this country and the courts lists are packed to the rafters with cases, but yet the government tells us they are doing a good job and that we should vote for parties.
Conversely, Independents have every right to tell people not to vote for political parties who are blinding themselves to the truth that they are making no difference. We have nothing to lose by voting for independents, groups, alliances. The established, old-guard political parties leave much to be desired as the cost of living soars and soars in an Ireland becoming unlivable for many.