What does Cork need?

Rhys Essien wrote: »

The South link inbound is in a bad way as is the N25 inbound,a 120kmph road with pot holes.:(

South Link only 100km/h (then 60, then 50) but it's in dire need of a good resurfacing. The surface is in bits and getting worse all the time. The outbound carriageway is in great shape though thanks to that ESB cabling job that necessitated it being resurfaced.

It's probably one of the busiest pieces of road in the state.

The N25's definitely in need of some serious work. It was in good shape until a few months ago. It's getting rapidly worse and worse.

I think to be perfectly honest Parc ui Caoimhe just sums up the GAA's fixation on Croke Park and total disregard for Cork fans, players and the city itself.

They've poured all their resources into a huge stadium in Dublin while leaving the country's second largest population centre with a stadium that looks like what you'd expect to see in a poor, developing country.

The stadium is an absolute embarrassment to the while city at this stage. It's an absolute kip.

We really should have a proper municipal stadium with top notch facilities that could be used for several sports and major events.

You'd expect something more like the Aviva / Landsdown road in Cork to accommodate soccer, rugby and GAA.

The GAA should have a smaller stadium for minor matches. I see them using huge places for very minor stuff a lot of the time.

Basically though, the whole strategy around stadia in Cork comes down to nonsense about refusing to share facilities with "foreign" games. It achieves nothing other than having several poor stadia instead of one really good and commercially viable complex.

It's a sad state of affairs really that our second city doesn't even have the facilities to host a minor international match and underlines the total incompetence of those in charge of distributing funds at national level.

People wonder why Corkonians have a chip on their shoulder - it's stuff like this. In many respects the city is undermined by being treated as "down the country" by the people divvying up the cash.

You see it for other things too like lack of proper support for the Opera House which was left so many times with half completed refurbishment projects.

There are a lot of cases where Cork is treated very badly and not like a second city.

It also tends to have no autonomy or control over things like :

Poor urban public transport - decisions made remotely by CIE companies and its bus network merged with Bus Eireann.

Sports facilities (see above)

Etc etc !

Most cities Cork's size else where would have an ability to locally manage these kinda of things.

I still find that in Ireland there's a mentality that you've Dublin and "the country".

The result has been that relatively large urban centres like Cork are seen by some decision makers as comparable like-for-like with relatively small regional towns.

It's often resulted in totally ridiculous levels of service and capital investment in the main cities.

We also can't seem to get out heads around the idea of building the cities as regional hubs. Instead you've poor transit connections to natural regional hubs in favour of radial links to Dublin at all costs.

The result of all of this had been spreading resources too thin and undermining the creation of any decent scale cities apart from Dublin, which has arguably sprawled to a stage that its become damaged too.

We'd probably have a much nicer country if we'd say 3 or 4 properly developed urban centres rather that what we've done which was to actually actively undermine that process!

ManMade wrote: »

Repaint the road markings.

Close those discount stores that are popping up everywhere.
.

There's not much you can do about that to be honest. That's more of a reflection of the state of the national/international economy than anything else as retailers aren't coming forward to fill vacant stores.

Kids in town are the least of our worries!
They're actually usually a good thing.

Biggest growing issue I'm seeing is junkies! Saw a few scary looking guys running across traffic - shouting abuse etc