What we really want for Christmas is a second Ikea store ... not another election
IWOKE my wife at 5.30am when I read the headline. She was panicked. Were the kids OK? Was the house on fire? Had we won the Lotto? No, it was way more dramatic than that – Ikea might be coming to Cork. She sat up in the bed. “What?”
Exactly – what? There had long been rumours that us tasteless culchies would get our own outlet of the iconic Swedish store, but now it looks like it might finally be happening.
No more will we have to use our imaginations or creativity to furnish our homes – now we have the world’s greatest purveyors of budget taste.
Granted, within six months of it opening, every home in Munster will have the exact same interior, but that’s what is so great about shopping in Ikea – no more thinking. We can just walk around it with smears of meatball sauce on our lips and dead eyes calculating heights and widths of various bits of storage that we only need to store the small bits we already got in Ikea Dublin and were able to bring home in the boot.
So it’s an exciting time for us boggers – now we can take the old sideboards and chaise longues that have been in the family since famine times and throw them all in a skip, only to replace them with a Fuurkenfoola or Ziffoowqska or whatever goofball names the marketing people at Ikea have given their furnishings this week.
Although the location has yet to be officially confirmed, it appears a lot of the focus is on the old Amgen site. It’s called that not because the pharma giant Amgen is based on it, or were ever on it, but rather that it was supposed to be there.
The Amgen announcement came back in 2006 – the site was to be developed and a staggering 1,100 jobs were being created. Everyone in Cork started preparing their CVs and readying the plans for their leaving do, as these weren’t just any jobs, they were pharma jobs. We were all going to be rich, rich I tells ya. But then the rumours started, whispers that the plant wasn’t going ahead.
This was roundly refuted by the then trade and enterprise minister Micheál Martin, who when asked about these rumours asked: “Who is spreading these rumours? Who is putting it around the place? It is outrageous that this would be said. Why would I want to do that? This is a fairly stupid rumour, to be frank.”
If he seemed tense, it’s probably because he was making those comments in April 2007, a few weeks before the general election. One month later, Fianna Fáil and the Greens swept to power. Then, in August 2007, the announcement was made that the Amgen plans were being scaled back. For any of us living in east Cork, the dream was already over. Everyone had heard the rumours – the parent firm was in freefall and the plant was never going to be built. One look at the site confirmed most of those claims. It had gone from being a hive of activity, to having a few lonely machines moving piles of earth about the place with no real purpose. Finally, in December 2007, what we all knew was confirmed; Amgen wasn’t coming to east Cork, and we were all back to staring at the wall in our dead-end jobs.
So now, as we breath a collective sigh of relief having seemingly avoided yet another general election – the least-desired one ever called – the petit bourgeoisie of Munster can only hope and pray that this isn’t some ergonomic carrot on a Swedish-designed stick, and that the old Amgen site doesn’t become the old Ikea site.