Michael Moynihan: Spruce-up to Cork’s main street is badly needed and long overdue
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A couple of weeks back RTÉ’s programme featured O’Connell Street in Dublin.
It was by way of a commemoration — one hundred years ago the name changed from Sackville Street to O’Connell Street, so it made sense to focus on the main street of the capital. Fair dues and all that.
Checks notes. Hang on, there were three shows on O’Connell Street. Three.
Is that a small bit over the top? Perhaps, though you could certainly argue that O’Connell Street’s size, centrality, and history combine to make a strong case for that much coverage.
Long-time readers, masochists that you are, will probably guess where I’m going next.
What would we use to fill three episodes of about St Patrick’s Street in the middle of Cork?
I’ll come back to that at some future date, but first things first: the good news about Pana.
Yesterday we learned, courtesy of Eoin English, that Cork City Council is finally going to address the state of the main thoroughfare and other associated streets in a major renovation project.
“The works will include the replacement of the damaged pedestrian crossings with new granite paving, the replacement of damaged utility covers and frames on the roadway and footpaths, the replacement of damaged street furniture including bollards, bike stands, tree surrounds, signs and poles, raised seating; and the replacement of road surfacing and line markings, where required.”
Not before time. As Eoin put it in his piece, with exquisite politeness, there has been “sustained criticism of City Hall in recent months about the state of the damaged pedestrian crossings, about the defective surfaces and about the unsightly temporary patchwork repairs on the crossings and on areas of pavement across the city centre.”
If you start at the Statue and walk along the street you have no shortage of derelict/boarded-up/abandoned/vacant sites. When this columnist strolled the length of St Patrick’s Street this Monday there were at least fifteen vacant premises along the street.
Yes, I know about the rise of online retail, the fall-out from covid, the cynical exploitation of property, the ruthless abandonment of premises. And yes, I know that there are issues in cities all over the world with urban decline, issues which are not confined to what’s going on between the North and South Channels.
Various sectors and interests can do all the side-stepping they like — ‘it’s not our fault, it’s , they’re the ones responsible’ — but that doesn’t change the hard facts.
Two years ago the CNN reporter Richard Quest visited Cork and caused a minor furore when he described Cork as looking ‘tired’ (full quote: “Some of the places look tatty. I thought that in Cork. I loved the [English] Market, but the buildings look tired downtown.”)
At the time the question was simple. Was he wrong?
Two years later, the question is slightly different: is Cork even worse now?
In that context the timing of the renovation announcement could hardly be better, because a terrible environment can have a terrible effect on those using it.
Last Friday, yours truly rolled through the middle of town — by rolled I mean walked, which exposed me to the curious phenomenon of the modern concertgoer.
Correction: the suburban teen concertgoer, a specific sub-genre.
Concerts at both Musgrave Park and Live At The Marquee coincided with the end of State exams, which accounted for the crowds of kids spilling out of buses along Patrick Street and elsewhere in the city — buses coming from suburbs north, south, east, and west, as well as other, more remote locations. (More remote than north, south, etc? — ed.)
I’m not sure if it was a deliberate Bus Éireann move but it seemed that many of the prospective concertgoers had flashed a naggin of vodka instead of a ticket for their journeys. That was the only conclusion to be drawn from the mass of such bottles to be seen around the city later in the evening, clanking emptily here and there. In places they looked like shoals of little fish trying to crowd away from a shark.
If they were slamming booze, though, that’s between them and their parents. What was of more interest to me was their attitude to the very centre of town. Was it a staging post for the stroll to the concert(s), a place to eye up and meet others, or just a handy open-air repository for empty bottles? Was it all three at once?
Option number three certainly applied, to judge by the aftermath. Hundreds of teenagers dumping their rubbish somewhere far from their own homes tells you a lot. Not so much about their drinking habits but about their view of their own city.
Focusing on St Patrick’s Street is timely for other reasons. Recently the city council announced that construction was to begin on Morrison’s Island Public Realm and Flood Defence Scheme, with more work slotted in for the quays. As everyone knows work is underway in what no-one this writer knows calls the Beamish & Crawford Quarter, including renovation of Bishop Lucey Park. That means development and investment around the fringes of the central island, and now the centre of the island — St Patrick’s Street — is also to be spruced up. It’s badly needed.
Those lumpy tarmacadam repairs on the tiled cross walks, the Beth Gali street lights streaked and stained with strips of posters and flyers — half-cleaned, half-ignored — the Bus Éireann hut smeared and scrawled with graffiti, the robot tree/eyesores, discoloured and spattered with pigeon droppings.
It all adds up, and it all combines. Is it any wonder teenage suburbanites think it’s okay to dump their rubbish in the middle of town when it looks like that?
The revamp doesn’t have to be all physical either. Many readers are old enough to remember the St Patrick's Street car ban a few years ago, when private cars were banned every day from 3pm to 6.30pm so that the centre of the city was free ... anyway, one councillor said it was so widely flouted that people were simply laughing at it.
On that note, the small print about the upcoming works shows that St Patrick’s Street will be closed northbound from July 1 to mid-August 2024 with a diversion via Grand Parade and other routes.
Understandable if major changes are needed, but it does spark one question.
If the existing infrastructure had been maintained properly would such large-scale works be needed?