Progress is inevitable but we shouldn’t ignore the neighbours
IMET an elderly lady last week in the post office. She was in school with my aunts who are long gone, and I have not seen her for quite some time. I don’t even know her name, but she used to come into my mum’s shop many moons ago and she recognised me.
We exchanged the usual pleasantries where she was asking how Mum was, and all my brothers and sisters. We chatted amicably and she mentioned my column which she reads religiously.
She asked if I had been near New Street lately. I drive that way home regularly. She asked me about the new hotel being built and I said had been watching its progress on the old Myra Glass site. She is all for progress and she fully understands the lack of housing etc., but, she asked, why build a hotel on the corner and not housing?
She proceeded to tell me how she loved the view she had of St Patrick’s Cathedral from her window every single day, and now it was gone, explaining it was like a dark cloud that came in one night and stole it away from her.
She was lamenting about the fact that the proximity of her house to this great landmark was one of the main reasons she stayed in that area all these years, when many of her family, neighbours and friends had moved to the suburbs. She is a ‘townie’ and that would never change.
Funnily enough, she also asked me if they would be changing the name of the place she lives as it certainly is not ‘Cathedral View’ any longer. I was not able to give her any answers. How could I?
I felt so sorry for this lovely lady. She had worked all her life and was quite happy with her lot until recently, living so close to town with her beautiful view. My heart goes out to her. She does not drive, but she is fearful that her street will now be full of cars blocking the one place she can see clearly out of — her front room.
Progress is inevitable and we desperately do need more housing. However, believe it or not we are very short of hotels in Dublin too for that matter.
OUR tourist industry employs one in ten people in this country and it is one of our fastest growing industries. There are debates all over the country about utilising parkland and green spaces to combat our chronic homeless shortage.
Are we going the right way about it? I don’t know. I always thought knocking down O’Devaney Gardens instead of refurbishing the once beautiful apartments there was totally crazy. I do know there are people sitting on masses of land for a number of years, and there has been talk about slapping heavy fines on these land owners if they do not build on or sell the space so that it may be used for housing. Again everything seems to be taking forever and nothing is happening fast enough to sort our shortage of houses.
All I know is that Darling Derry and I have been through the planing process on numerous occasions. We had objections, some we felt were justified and others we felt were not. We have lost this golden opportunity of an Apple site in Athenry as it is going to be built in Denmark because of our outdated planning laws. In the long run, Derry and I had to prove that what we were planning to do considered our neighbours, the neighbourhood and the surrounding area. I feel that in the case of this elderly lady, someone from the hotel or the developers should have considered the neighbours to this new building. There is still time for this to happen.
They need to keep the residents sweet if their guests are going to be comfortable. They also will be depending on the locals to work there and be the friendly Dubliners we all are when tourists come our way. There should be a little kindness and a lot of talk before this new hotel opens in July.