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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
6 2 October 2016
O
n Monday 19 September there was one city
grabbing Irish headlines - Limerick. Unusu-
ally, it has remained in the news, as if in
compensation for years of neglect. Ireland's
underdog has been thrown a €500 million
bone in the form of the Limerick 2030 Plan. The fanfare
for this much-needed recovery plan coincided with the
launch of a new company, the Limerick Twenty Thirty
Strategic Development DAC (Designated Activity Com-
pany). This meaty mouthful is the biggest single Irish
commercial property development programme under-
taken outside of the capital in the history of the state.
If funding is, in time, secured for this wish list what
lasting physical changes does this plan bring to Limerick
city?
It is no coincidence that Limerick was, innovatively if not
surprisingly, unveiled as one of Europe's most attractive
investment locations a mere three months after Brexit.
The UK's moment of uncertainty has become Limerick's
opportunity.
Located just twenty minutes away from Shannon Inter-
national Airport, Limerick is doing everything in its
power to encourage UK and US companies to set up shop
in the Mid West rather than in yesterday’s Mecca,
London.
Its Executive Chairman Denis Brosnan, saturnine
former CEO of Kerry Group, will prioritise the redevelop-
ment of 130,000 sq m (1.4m sq ft) of prime real estate
across four strategic sites into office, retail, residential,
educational and enterprise space. Unfortunately, how
-
ever, the all-embracing vision is in danger of being no
vision at all. Certainly there is no sense that anyone
thinks Limerick has a unique selling point, or at least not
one they’d be proud of.
The Limerick Twenty Thirty DAC is completely owned
by Limerick City and County Council with an independ
-
ent board which faces the arduous task of sourcing the
money. The four developments that were identified to
transform Limerick are the Gardens International Office,
the Opera Site, Cleeve’s Riverside Campus and Troy Stu-
dios Film Hub.
The removal of historic names and the creation of his
-
toric associations is very telling in this bid to rebrand,
concededly undervalued, Limerick.
lady not a dame
Limerick Twenty Thirty is progress but sells the
city short, failing to learn the lessons of rejuvenation
elsewhere, focusing on quantity not quality,
and not engaging locals
Unfortunately the all-
embracing vision is in danger
of being no vision at all
October 2016 6 3
Limerick Twenty Thirty have so far secured €18m funds for the 11,000
sq m (112, 000 sq ft) Gardens International Office with designs by
Cork-based Carr Cotter Naessens Architects.
The existing five-storey eyesore was partially built by developer
Robert Butler in 2009 during the boom before descending into
NAMA. It is located at the former GPO complex and Roche's 'Hang-
ing Gardens' building on Lower Henry Street. Limerick City and
County Council acquired the site together with the adjacent No 19
Henry Street in 2014.
The famous 'Hanging Gardens' were unique within the City, indeed
(perhaps outside Babylon) in the world. They were conceived by the
wealthy banker William Roche as a vast store, surmounted by
enclosed gardens. “In the early years of the present century Limer-
ick possessed a curiosity which was without a parallel in the empire”,
wrote the Reverend James Dowd in 1890 in his book 'Limerick and
Its Sieges'. The design featured “stores under a series of arches rang-
ing from 25 to 40 feet high. On top of these arches elevated terraced
or 'hanging' gardens were created and the whole structure was
crowned with classical statues”.
There is no obvious reason why the evocative word 'hanging' was
dropped by the spoilsport neophytes. Presumably some misan-
thropic marketing executive advised against the negative
connotations of the word 'hanging', as if it were or ‘stabbing’ or
‘stabbed’. In its absence this fascinating building is – gratuitously
- rendered duller, and ahistorical.
The 'Opera' site entered the local vernacular as such, not because it
ever accommodated an 'Opera house' but because the eighteenth-
century opera singer Catherine Hayes was born in a house on the
block, before performing the wonders of world opera worldwide,
though not in Limerick.
It is 3.7 acres in area and located in the oldest part of Newtown
Pery. It was bought from NAMA for €12.5m, no song, by Limerick City
and County Council in 2011 with funds made available from the
Department of the Environment's Regeneration budget after failure
to secure investment from the private sector.
Following an open-tender process, ‘a special-purpose-vehicle’
set-up by the Council - under the strangely-familiar name Aecom -
will carry out the works.
The Opera site contains 30 buildings, most of which are in pre
-
dominantly intact Georgian terraces on Rutland Street, Patrick
Street, Ellen Street and Bank Place. This development will be of
mixed use with a spread of public and private sector uses and small-
scale retail.
The proposed scheme will cost €120m to €150m. The conservation
approach is to retain the façade only on Patrick Street – a policy jet-
tisoned worldwide and for more than 20 years in Dublin as ‘facadist’
and fake - but to emphasise the retention of (no-longer-ergonomic)
existing plot and volumes.
Where there has been twentieth-century intervention the design
team has gone to town with proposed insertions such as the on-
site replacement of the Cahill May Roberts building (1958) but in a
grand new incarnation, completely out-of-scale, insensitively
dwarfing its neighbours.
The proposed new scheme is a grainy shadow of proposals for a
€350m ‘Opera Shopping Centre’ plans which was granted planning
permission in 2006 as part of the famous Limerick scorched earth
policy on heritage. In December 2007 Anglo Irish Bank had
acquired a 50 percent share of this ‘exciting potential landmark’
with a view to selling it on to private clients but failed to do so.
6 4 October 2016
Of the four sites only Cleeve’s will retain its historic
name. The eight-acre former factory site comprising
100,000 sq ft of existing space is located on the north-
ern bank of the Shannon River with a distinctive chimney
dominating the city skyline. The Condensed Milk Com-
pany of Ireland or Cleeve’s factory was established in
1883 by Thomas Cleeve, a Canadian who first came to
Ireland as a teenager to work for his uncle. Cleeve’s
dairy-based products were exported throughout the
British Empire, the most famous product being toffee.
The processing plant was sold to Golden Vale, a subsidi-
ary of the Kerry Group, in 1974. Denis Brosnan's former
role with that company helped in its purchase.
After being left vacant since 2011 the site was pur-
chased in 2014 by Limerick City and County Council for
€3.5m. It is zoned city centre (commercial) in the Limer
-
ick City Development Plan 2010: 'To support the retention
and expansion of a wide range of commercial, cultural,
leisure and residential use in the commercial core area,
(apart from comparison retail uses)’.
No building these days in Dublin is worth a second com-
mercial glance without the inclusion of the term 'hub' in
its name. And so we have the former Dell factory in
Castletroy which closed in 2003 when Dell centralised
its manufacturing at Raheen, on the other side of the city.
Dell subsequently closed the Raheen plant, in 2009,
when it shifted 1,900 jobs to Lodz in Poland. The com-
pany made up about 5.5% of all exports from Ireland at
the time and its Limerick facility was at one stage its
biggest manufacturing plant anywhere in the world. The
loss of Dell was a shattering blow to the local economy
and esteem, with many of Limerick's citizens blaming the
miserable local TDs who should have done more to halt
it. The reuse of this building is symbolic of Limerick's
renewed confidence. Now Castletroy itself to be a – no
doubt iconic – hub.
Limerick City and County Council last year bought the
340,000 sq ft building for €6m to turn it into a TV and
film production studio. It is currently being refurbished
and leased to Ardmore Studios on a 20-year lease. The
studio will employ 6-10 full-time core staff. There is
growing international interest in Ireland as a production
location thanks to the benefits of the newly enhanced
film tax credit scheme (Section 481).
The dropping of the 'castle' from Castletroy suggests
that the studios wish to contrive an entirely false asso
-
ciation with the Greek city that was besieged for ten
years. At least, they will have thought, it diverts atten-
tion from the whole Limerick thing. Trojan work, lads.
October 2016 6 5
Residential figures for Limerick City are low, with not a
single taker for the Living City tax scheme. Like Dublin a
generation ago received wisdom has that middle-class
Limerick people will not live in the historic city centre.
This scheme is notably challenging this dreary
assumption.
Good urban spatial design is predicated on the construc-
tion not just of buildings but also of the tedious routes
and in-between public spaces. In the new Limerick there
will be no place for such waste. Public space will have no
role in the excitingly bland, iconically forgettable glass
boxes lauded as the fangled antidote to Limerick's eco
-
nomic slump.
One exception is O'Connell Street, Limerick's main
thoroughfare, which is to be pedestrianised, in one of
Ireland's major public-realm projects.
Lead designer, engineering firm Arup, in conjunction
with urban designers Nicholas de Jong Associates, have
been given the posterity-forging job of transforming the
city's main thoroughfare from an unappealing, car-dom-
inated through-way into an attractive civic space
befitting an ambitious ‘liveable’ European city.
This, along with Catherine Street and Henry Street, is
one of the three streets identified, as key to rejuvenation
in an earlier, 2013, Limerick 2030 Plan: an Economic and
Spatial Plan for Limerick.
There are two characters to the two-headed animal
that is O'Connell Street, once an urban gem but now chip-
per-central. The eastern end is largely part of the retail
heart of the city; the western end comprises largely
intact Georgian blocks, many currently used as offices
and storage space or enticingly vacant. What takes from
the enjoyment of the street is the large volumes of vehic-
ular traffic through the city to the suburbs: an opportunity
waiting to be unlocked. Here if there is any verve lies the
future.
Residential figures for
Limerick City are low with not
a single taker for the Living
City tax scheme. Until now
received wisdom has been
that middle-class Limerick
people will not live in the
historic city centre
6 6 October 2016
If it sounds like we have heard the Limerick Twenty Thirty
Plan before, it's because we have. In June 2013 an earlier,
€250m, Limerick 2030 Plan was launched, aiming to
transform Limerick through the development of seven
strategic sites and of 750,000 sq ft of much-needed
office space, and by the creation of a dedicated market-
ing company to tout the city to investors.The intrepid
imaginations behind the future of Limerick clearly felt
the name of their plan was so good they used it twice.
The earlier plan was successful in securing commit-
ments from the local educational institutions to move
departments to the city centre - a not insignificant ges-
ture to reversal of the retrograde decision to set up a
third-level educational institution – UL - outside of the
city in Castletroy. This was a coherent plan playing, as
good urban plans should, to a genuine local strength.
Sadly there has been little progress and hence perhaps
this relaunch.
The money isn't there yet but at least Limerick has made
it easy for potential investors to imagine a return. That
could be a good start.
It is likely there will be new energy, though whether it
will become, as Brosnan infectiously envisages, Ire-
land’s second city is another question.
The problem with these plans is that they fail to learn
the lesson of a generation of urban rejuvenation, par-
ticularly in Dublin. Development should be
community-led, rather than driven by well-meaning but,
in particular, well-heeled outsiders; development should
focus on reviving the best of the spirit of an area rather
than imposing a new one; development should focus on
quality not quantity; development should be integrated:
there should be a sense of how all this will tie in with
plans to regenerate Moyross, South Hill and Ballina-
curra/Weston, a little further out.
In some respects it is a pity that rejuvenation of Lim
-
erick City will not benefit from tax incentives because
the likes of Temple Bar were beginning to show how qual-
ity standards can be effected by linking tax incentives to
delivery of key quality criteria.
The plans for Limerick are ambitious but, like the
doomed plan for an ill-begotten meandering footbridge
nearby, they need more thought, more attention to detail
and more local democracy.
There is ultimately a sense that some of the people
behind a possible new Limerick don’t at heart love the
old one enough.
This is no petty place.
Limerick’s buildings tell a story of the development of
Limerick and the social and cultural values of a proud
and talented people. Architecture must be not only a
physical presence, but also about history and aesthetic
values.
There is a sense in Limerick, whisper it for we do not
want to be cynical, that the city fathers are selling us
short, aiming to improve this great city rather than to
make it the best.
These issues – the vision – must be resolved before
the focus moves mundanely to finding investors.
Because Limerick is a lady not a dame.
Emma Gilleece is an architectural historian
from Limerick
This is no
petty city
October 2016 6 7
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