Cork - A City Failing!

There’s something rotten in the state of Cork! For years, the supposed “City Rising” has been trapped in a downward spiral. Yes, new and impressive buildings have sprung up along Albert Quay and around Kent Station, I work in one of them, however behind that glossy veneer, the city has been slowly falling apart. The streets are pockmarked with potholes that more often than not border on craters, pavement stones are loose and waiting to trip up unsuspecting pedestrians. What should be sweeping urban plazas are desolate wastes, dotted with black asphalt scars where trees used to be. Entire streets have been reduced to looking like a war zone, with crumbling shells of buildings held up by rusting steel beams, ready to crush passers-by. That’s if you can walk down those streets in the first placed without being run over by cars, lorries and delivery vans criss-crossing every which way, ignoring red lights and using narrow laneways as rat runs. Even they can count themselves lucky if they’re able to get somewhere, given how choked the streets are in traffic, with cars parked every which way, blocking lanes, intersections and what have you.

As dreary and depressing as this sounds, for most cities this would be a clarion call for some drastic action to completely revamp the city. And there are certainly a significant number of progressive city councillors in Cork that see it likewise, with quite a few less progressive but at least open-minded councillors, as well as a number of campaigners and business owners, so there is a significant groundswell for the type of progressive measures that would be necessary. Yet, for the last couple of years, the city has seemingly been paralysed, with nothing changing. Given the significant progressive element within Cork, how can this be? What’s preventing the city from moving forward and developing into the vibrant place it has the potential to be?

The issue it seems is not with the city council, at least not totally, but with the city council executive, an undemocratic, unelected and largely inscrutable body of public servants who are tasked with the actual running of the city. And to be frank, this executive is failing at every conceivable level! To be fair, the state of repair of public infrastructure in Cork city wasn’t particularly great to begin with. However, in the years since 2015, the approach to maintenance has deteriorated significantly, from “ah shure, it’ll be grand” to “Not a single fuck was given”. The streets have gone from being potholed to being a lunar obstacle course, while the sidewalks contain enough loose stones and similar “booby traps” to make every Vietcong’s heart skip a beat! As for North Main Street, the historic spine of the city, let me put it this way: I was a kid when the Iron Curtain fell and Germany reunited. In the years that followed, I’d spend a LOT of time in Eastern Europe, far beyond the glitzy main streets of the major cities. Yet even small towns and cities deep in the boondocks of Eastern Germany, with all the dereliction, disinterest and mismanagement of forty years of socialist rule and prior to any national or European investment in restoration were often in significantly BETTER shape than North Main Street is at the moment! 

Oh, and don’t get me started on the cycling or public transport infrastructure, that’s really just painful. Back before 2014, the city invested a lot of money in the development of a “rump” network of cycle lanes, bike parking and the development of Coca Cola Zero Bikes, a public bike-share system, the latter of which launched over the winter of 2014 into early 2015. I was a huge fan of Coke Zero Bikes when they originally launched, and I still use it when I’m in the city and need to get to places like Fitzgerald Park, but in the years since its launched, it has deteriorated to the point of near-uselessness due to years of neglect and poor maintenance, as well as a lack of expansion or even any type of engagement with the operator by the council executive.

That’s not to say that transport infrastructure is the only area where the executive is failing hard! Oh no, not by a long shot. Consider parks. The city has quite a few of them, even more so now that the city borders were finally extended to something resembling an appropriate size. In fact, I ran a series of articles about a few of them back in 2016. Some of them, such as Fitzgerald Park, are little jewels, well-kept and attractive, and Fitzgerald Park in particular is  usually packed to the rafters whenever weather and pandemics allow. Others are less attractive, such as Bishop Lucey Park right in the city centre, while yet others are just open patches of grass with no amenities whatsoever. However, it’s the latest addition to this eclectic collection that’s producing facepalm moments like there’s no tomorrow. That’s the Tramore Valley Park on the city’s southside. Formerly a landfill, it’s been converted into a large park over the last couple of years, and while large parts of it seem a bit barren, without much in the way of tree cover, it is still by far the largest park of its size on the south side. It was finally opened last year after numerous lengthy delays that made one wonder whether Cork was trying to compete with the new airport in Berlin or something. Okay to be fair, when you open a park on a landfill site, you can expect some surprises. Yet despite being a city park and being located right next door to the rather affluent Douglas area of the city, it is only really accessible via the South Link Road, and the entrance there is for cars only. There is no pedestrian entrance to the site.

At least none that is open, that is. There is an access gate on the northern edge of the Park, at the end of Half Moon Lane, a little side street of South Douglas Road, and one that leads from the park right to a densely populated suburb. You’d imagine that it would be the highest priority of the city fathers to open that gate. Yet for some inscrutable reason, this gate has been padlocked ever since the opening of the park, and any attempts to convince the city executive to open it have run squarely into a brick wall. They keep throwing out all kinds of weird and wonderful excuses, the latest being that a pedestrian crossing near the entrance to Half Moon Lane is apparently too dangerous. Weird that this crossing seems to be safe enough for the hundreds of students at the nearby Christ King Girl’s Secondary School? I guess children are expendable in the eyes of the Council Executive. It was in the response to the ongoing campaign to open this pedestrian gate that councillor Terry Shannon showed his true face, calling the campaigners “whingers” and stating that they made him “sick”, on record in the Echo no less. He later followed this up by calling on cycling and pedestrian campaigners to apologise to the city council after the Council’s Chief Executive, Ann Doherty had told a calculated and very thinly veiled sob story, again in the Echo. 

Asking campaigners to stop calling out public servants for their failings? What the hell does Terry Shannon expect? That we sing their praises and spread rose petals wherever any member of the executive treads? That we line the streets with our right arms in the air shouting “Hail the Council”? Maybe “Hail Shannon” might be a better option? As a member of the council, you are a public servant, and you serve first and foremost the people of Cork. It is your job to serve the entire city, which means it is your job to engage with all people in this city to improve the city overall. Campaigns and action groups, as much as one might disagree with them, are part and parcel of a living breathing city and should be welcomed. By outright insulting campaigners, Mr. Shannon has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that he is not on the council to further the cause of the city, but for purely egotistical purposes, probably with quite a bit of self-enrichment on the side. The fact that he now claims that the pedestrianisation of Marina Park, a riverside park area in the east of the city, is due to his work is nothing than a cynical fig leaf to cover his manifest petulance and intransigence!

But we’re not done with the antics of the city’s public servants, not by a long shot. Cork City Council truly is the gift that keeps on giving! You see, Terry Shannon is not the only member of the council to engage in an outright vendetta against campaigners. Before the Tramore Valley Park issue came to a head, there was, and still is, the ugly issue of bike lanes in the city. Back in 2015, when Coca Cola Zero Bikes started in Cork, I remarked how the system was well-placed to utilise a small but growing system of cycle lanes. Well, fast forward to 2018, and that small network has fallen into disrepair and rendered all but useless by being abused as parking spaces or loading bays. For much of that time, city councillor Fiona Ryan of Solidarity has been fighting tooth and nail in the city council to get those bike lanes protected by bollards or flexible wands, only to be completely stonewalled. When cycling campaigners went directly to Council CEO Ann Doherty in December 2019 to see whether they could get things moving that way, Ms. Doherty went off on a rant about cyclists on sidewalks and other old and worn-out anti-cyclist tropes. Things haven’t moved since. 

So far, so frustratingly normal for Cork City Council. However, some more disturbing insights have recently come to light. Apparently, Ms. Doherty was so enraged with the results of her meeting with a public advocacy groups coming to light that any type of engagement or cooperation with any cycling group was taken off the table. Apparently, the intention had been to use the prospect of new or better cycle lanes as a “carrot” or reward for good behaviour, but that since cycling campaigners had gotten uppity this was now off the table to put them back into their place. To sum up, cyclists are being forced to cycle in unsafe and potentially lethal conditions, to risk their lives simply because the CEO of the Cork City Council Executive threw a tantrum when cycling campaigners started, well, campaigning. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions from this.

You might judge from the above that the city council is only ignoring its responsibilities towards cyclists or pedestrians, but that would not be doing the council or the executive justice. Residents, motorists and business owners are being ignored as well. I mentioned North Main Street earlier on. This is the historic “spine” of the city, though there’s little of any actual historic significance left on that street after a millennium of destruction and rebuilding. Anyway, to claim that this street has seen better days would be the understatement of the year. For almost a decade, buildings all along the street have been left to rot and collapse with no reaction at all from the council. Just recently, a major collapse nearly destroyed a landmark building on the southern end of North Main Street, and effectively closed the street to traffic while the building was stabilised. The buildings in question aren’t empty, mind you. Their owners are apparently some well-known businessmen in the city who have plans for the plots those buildings are built on. However, for those plans, the existing buildings would apparently have to disappear, and since a lot of the structures on North Main Street are listed buildings, they can’t just be torn down.

In any other city, you’d expect the city council to be all over this, engaging with the property owners to resolve the situation, or penalising them if the owners don’t cooperate. Yet for some reason, the Executive here in Cork is once again doing sweet fuck all to remedy the situation. As a result, ever since the partial collapse of the affected buildings back in June 2019, the street is partially blocked and the first thing any visitor sees when walking up North Main Street is a graffiti-festooned building site fence, as well couple of derelict buildings held up by rusty steel girders. What’s more, the site attracts litter and anti-social activity like a magnet. This obviously has a significant detrimental influence on the traders and business owners on North Main Street, who have repeatedly reached out to the city council to get the issue resolved, but just like the park or cycling campaigners mentioned above, they keep running head-first into a brick wall, with city representatives offering only mealy-mouthed excuses about a “complex and difficult problem”. Truth be told, this is neither difficult nor complex. The slum lords who own the properties in question aren’t fulfilling their obligations to keep the properties in decent shape, therefore, these buildings should be taken into public ownership. The laws for this are on the books, and while such a compulsory purchase order isn’t the quickest way of dealing with the issue, it would still be a whole lot quicker than whatever it is the city council is not doing at the moment. Moreover, the businesses on North Main Street are not the only ones who are kept hanging. The same complaints about being stonewalled are regularly aired by business owners all over the city. There is no engagement by Cork City Council with any of them when it comes to advertisement or future plans for the city. The only thing that the council is interested in is their rate payments, and woe betide anyone who doesn’t want to pay. As for the people actually living in the city centre, I’m not even sure if the council knows that they exist, given that most of the residential properties in the centre are rental properties, and anyone who lives in one of those is considered subhuman in Ireland anyway!

Then there are the motorists, the loudest and most obnoxious group of ignoramuses in the entire city. They dwarf even the mind-numbing ignorance of certain council members, which is quite an achievement. That being said, they do have a number of legitimate grievances. The roads in Cork are simply atrocious, there is no other way of putting it. Potholes are everywhere, and the way some traffic is routed through the city is confusing, to put it mildly. This isn’t helped by the fact that the city centre is a maze of time-limited road closures that all seem to follow their own rhythm. Patrick Street is closed to cars from 3PM to 6.30PM, while Oliver Plunkett Street is closed from 11AM to 5PM, and god only knows what’s going on with the side streets of Oliver Plunkett Street. And all of that is before we get to the issue of the streets themselves. Many of those are simply too small to accommodate the amount of traffic they’re handling these days. Unlike many cities on the continent or in the UK, Cork was never subjected to the massive amounts of destruction brought about by the Second World War and thus never had a chance to build up a semi-decent street network. All of this leads to a confusing labyrinth of streets, lanes, one-way streets, pedestrian priority zones that are regularly and other “fun” features.

You would think that, given this subpar road infrastructure, the city council would endeavour to keep as much motorised traffic out of the city centre as possible, but once again you’d be wrong! Cork City Council is consistently trying to cram more traffic into the city, whatever the cost may be. Their approach to traffic management is akin to a morbidly obese man trying to stave off heart attacks and clogged arteries by simply stuffing more and more cholesterol into himself. As someone who’s producing quite the significant gravitational field, I can tell from experience that that ain’t gonna work, honey! Yet for some reason, the council insists on continuing with this policy. Mind you, they’re not actually doing anything to improve the experience for motorists either. Traffic lights are a lottery, lanes change all of a sudden without warning, and parking is a nightmare.

Speaking of parking, let’s talk about that for a moment. One of the biggest issues in Cork is that motorists park every which way. Loading bay? Doesn’t matter. Sidewalk? It’s free real estate. Bike lane? That’s basically a written invitation! Bus stop? Sure only the unemployed use that! Even supposedly pedestrian plazas get taken over by motorists quicker than an oil-rich nation in the Middle East! And once again, the council is doing absolutely nothing about it. Parking enforcement is practically non-existent in the city. Whenever it does happen, it amounts to a paper parking ticket that is jammed under the windshield wiper and more often than not simply thrown away by the owner of the offending vehicle. Any attempts to introduce a more robust parking enforcement regime, for example by towing illegally parked cars is treated with the same disdain that one would gain by serving a rare rib-eye steak at a vegan convention. One of the excuses thrown around in such a situation is that disabled people need to park near their destination, so they don’t have to walk so far. Well maybe the walking wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the sidewalks were wide enough and clear of parked cars in the first place? I guess that’s too much of a leap of logic for the council!

Then there are the parking discs. With on-street parking so prevalent in the city, you’d expect the city would at least try to cash in on that by having parking meters located all over the city, you know, like cities all over Europe have had since I was a kid? Well, once again, you’d be wrong. Cork City Council uses a thoroughly antiquated system of parking discs that you have to purchase at a disc retailer, mark out manually and then display in your car. Where can you buy those discs? Honestly, I have no clue, the link on the city council website leads exactly nowhere! So not only is Cork City Council somehow incapable of implementing a system that has been in place all over Europe since the very early 1990s, people from outside of Cork are effectively kept in the dark about where to purchase these parking discs and are left with no choice but either parking illegally, or using one of the multi-story car parks in the city.

All in all, it’s not a pretty picture for Cork as far as the performance of the city council is considered. Still, it’s not as if the council has done nothing at all over the last couple of years. There’s always this:

Yep, that’s right. A massive PR campaign to extoll the virtues of Cork as a place to invest, to live, to visit, or to study. You know, if you can actually get to work without getting run over, stuck in traffic, or being constantly late because of poor public transport infrastructure. A place that you can live in if you’re willing to have several years cut of your life expectancy by the massive amounts of car exhausts or all the weird and wonderful stuff that is blasted out by people still burning coal. A place that you can visit if you manage to find your way around and can avoid being run over by cars. Because painting your house in a new colour with the hopes of covering up the cracks in the walls has always worked out so well. And then there’s the slogan: We are Cork! This sounds familiar somehow…

Oh, yes. Always a bright idea to lift a catchphrase from a soulless horde of biomechanical horrors that allows no individuality or dissent whatsoever and that will kill and enslave without mercy to extoll the hospitality, uniqueness and quirkiness of a city. And they actually paid an agency to come up with this? Okay, snarky comments aside for a second, it is vital for a city like Cork, now the second largest English speaking city in the EU, to aggressively fight for any new company that is looking to set up shop over here in Europe, I get that. I also get that you need a snappy slogan and logo for that and to be honest, the whole We are Cork thing isn’t really that bad from a branding point of view.

However, this is basically the only thing Cork City Council has actually achieved in the nearly six years since Ann Doherty took over as Chief Executive. Pretty much everything else amounts to either complete and utter failure, as in the points I mentioned above and other s that I haven’t even bothered to mention such as littering or antisocial activity, or it has turned out to be vapourware, with flowery statement seemingly written for councillors and council executives by a third rate PR coach, impressive full-colour brochures that just drift away like smoke from a BBQ on a summer's evening. The people of Cork have every right to be dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, they have every right to be hostile towards the likes of Terry Shannon, Ann Doherty, and all the other impediments to progress in city hall. They are ruining the city, and deserve to be called out on it. Their performance has been absolutely abysmal, if I’d performed even remotely as bad in even the least demanding job I’ve had then I’d have never even made it through my probation. Lets make sure Ann Doherty, Terry Shannon et. al. don’t last much longer either!