Depressing and congested town

The people living in a town are the ones that make it the way it is. Numerous tidy towns committees and local clean up groups are out every week in different towns and villages keeping them looking well and improving them. Maybe look to get something like that set up OP? I'm sure plenty of people feel like you do and will be happy to get involved.

Volunteer for a tidy towns group or some sort of community group.

Moaning on the internet won't do anything about it.

Caller, those empty beer cans in the park are worth 15c each! Park is paved with gold!

Portlaoise.

When the OP mentions a traffic choked town, Claregalway comes to mind. A town that is actively hostile to anyone outside a car.

Tidy towns came to my mind too if not already a group to join set one up, some exercise, can be social and resolve issues with unkept town

Ballyshannon? Dereliction central, and the short Erne river valley is littered with multi-coloured drink cans/bottles that anyone passing through can see

Nothing in this post has anything to do with the op

To be fair to Tullamore, and it does have its issues but it doesn’t seem to have been hit tok hard with the wild kids on scooters making mischief everywhere too badly yet. Fair bit of invest has gone into the centre of the town too. Biggest problem it has imo is very very poor shopping options for a town its size and very heavy traffic at busy times. Every change they make to the traffic plans seems to worsen it too.

OP described many towns in Ireland.

We are going back there, possibly a worse one, as it is cyclical even when they print more money, but it would be preferable to go pre '95 imo, when nobody seemed to really care if they did not have a 7 bedroom mcmansion for the 3 kids and possible guests.

NIMBYism blamed for the lack of building often on here when in reality it is the lack of constructive ideas. The congestion is growing worse and very poor, if any attempts at building outwards are happening or even being considered.

Congestion, pollution and exodus from the towns to be repeated until greed no longer controls where the developers build and the developers no longer dictate to the politicians.

Finding a small green space in a town to build 24 apartments and a potential extra 48+ cars is not helping anywhere.

The government needs to incentivise the renovation of derelict buildings in town centres. Any developer looking to build an estate on the outskirts of a town should have to make a contribution to a town centre as part of the planning application approval.

To be fair local authorities are able to access central funding through the “town and village” renewal scheme. A lot of towns have undergone quite a bit of work and look well. The derelict buildings schemes exist too. But the only businesses that seem viable on aMain Street are coffee shops / cafes, phone repair places, vaping, hair dressers, nail places and barbers and takeaways.

The epidemic of feral youths, grey track suit bottoms black hoodies are a plague. Most are out of school at 16 and don’t really have a purpose. There is also congestion with traffic in most places which doesn’t enhance the urban experience.

kilrush?

It can be like that in Ennis when there is a match on so maybe there was one on while you were there.

Tidy towns etc do make a big effort in Ennis but they are fighting a losing battle. Too many vape and charity shops are killing the atmosphere. Also too many people have been opening businesses in recent years that are 100% guaranteed to fail such as sweet shops and stupid things like that.

Looking back at when Ennis was booming it was mainly down to a hard drinking culture which doesn't exist in Ireland anymore. People came for the drink often starting out in resteraunts and the sheer numbers of people around helped all the businesses in town.

That was the day of the league match - was a large crowd at the match, unfortunately the GAA (not just) are allowed to build stadiums in the middle of towns and provide zero parking so that's what happens.