The Bodee Bag

8th Feb 2007

The Body Bag
Alan Ger

Passing Bishop Lucy Park at the weekend, it must seem like an unforgivable waste of space to developers roaring past in their 07-C enviromelting SUV beasts.

Who would bet against developers licking their lips at the thought of ready mix trucks backing up to the park gates and unloading thousands of metres of concrete into the park to pour foundations to accommodate more apartments or another UK retailer.

Emmet Place's aright

European cities are renowned for huge public spaces for people to interact in. Whether you want to hang out with friends and drink coffee and gats or organise a bongo slapping protest over the price of sandals and incense, large open public squares are the place to do it.

The importance of public spaces and subsequently places to socialise, are becoming more and more obvious as Cork City becomes densely populated. City living in hot and stuffy Madrid for example, is complimented by a wide variety of parks and lakes bang in the middle of the city. You might be pent up in a little apartmento but a game of football, Frisbee or just panning out with a book beside a lake is just around the corner.

Bishop Lucy Park for all its glory is rather petite and could barely accommodate a game of cards or Connect Four not to mind anything that involves physical movement with the crowds on a sunny day.

PROC and all of its members are fully appreciative of the regeneration of the city centre, the new look Pana, Grand Parade, Emmet Place, lots of new stores to keep things varied and competitive and even the improvement of the road surface of our many side streets and lanes is something which largely goes unnoticed.

However, current discomfort grows from the apparent worrying obsession with attracting big name retailers to the city and, more importantly, what Cork institutions or less commercially viable ideas are bulldozed out of the way to do so. Very soon there will be shopping centres on the site of the sorely missed Cineplex, on Academy Street backing onto Emmet Place, on Half Moon Street behind the Opera House and on the Coal Quay.

Plans for a hotel were scuppered for further retail space

One hopes that City Council and the developers have done their homework and are convinced that shoppers will be drawn, for years to come, to a city centre that has increasingly less to offer other than shopping.

Without wanting to sound like a bunch of out of date doomsday lefties tied to a tree in the Glen of the Downs, we hope that Cork is not going to turn into another clean but ultimately boring city centre like Manchester where the options for a day out extend as far as shopping and er'