Cork is harbouring ambitious plans for the future
A TIDE is turning for Cork’s harbour, and for the better. After decades of neglect, and dirty industry, then thousands of job losses in heavy industries such as Irish Steel, IFI and Verolme, it’s cleaning up its act, finally.
There’s a surge of people enjoying its waterways, wildlife, walks and linkages, and amenities. It’s being reclaimed by its residents, and offered up to visitors.
To replace many of those harbour jobs lost in the 1980s and 1990s, there is up to €200m in development projects (plus a planned €80m relocation of Port of Cork to Ringaskiddy) in the next few years. The harbour is poised to take on a more democratic, embracing role in the life of Cork’s residents and to play an increasing role in Irish tourism, via cruise ships, waterfront walks, cycle-ways and multi-faceted visitor attractions in Spike Island, Camden Fort, Haulbowline and Cobh, along with investment in marine transport, safety training, and maritime and energy research.
An emerging research cluster at Ringaskiddy, around the National Maritime College and dynamic research centre, IMERC, will become a nucleus for employment of 3,000 to 4,000 next to Haulbowline, where the Irish Naval Service employs 1,050 personnel, while the traditional pharma sector in the greater harbour still employs 4,000, and as many again indirectly.
The potential of Cork Harbour was strongly signalled in this year’s upbeat Chamber of Commerce address by its president Gillian Keating. Fifteen minutes of her 40-minute delivery to 1,000 dinner guests extolled the positive ripples spreading out from Ringaskiddy, driven by local research and entrepreneurial enterprise, into renewable energy.
The wind comes into the sails of renewal in the year when a €40m clean-up of the heavily contaminated old steel plant and waste tip on Haulbowline, finally gets underway, too — more than a decade after the closure of the ISPAT/Irish Steel plant.
A thing as simple as cleaning up River Lee’s water quality, which was only largely achieved in 2005 (there’s still treatment work to do in the lower harbour) was the catalyst in returning the waterways to its citizenry as a place to enjoy, to boat on, and even to bathe in, or camp out around, with calls now for many more access points, such as slipways, pontoons and marinas.
The outcome now is that Cork no longer turns its back to the water. Incredibly, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s only in the past decade that the city and surrounds stopped using the harbour as a giant toilet bowl — flushing 60m litres of untreated sewage daily into the water, where foul waste was neither out of sight nor out of mind, nor even out of smell.
The River Lee, Lough Mahon and the harbour beyond bobbed with waste, and their waters ran green, brown and red (red from the few remaining slaughterhouses), and, as the ‘Boys of Fairhill’ song rightly judged, “the smell from Patrick’s Bridge is wicked.”
It took an EU wastewater directive, back in 1991, and a subsequent €100m investment, plus major city centre disruption, spread over seven long years of digging and 22 engineering contracts, to reverse two centuries of reckless abandon and daily despoiling.
In the end, by the start of the 21st century, Cork got at least 20th century pumping stations and treatment plants to cater for an anticipated greater city and harbour population of 400,000 people.
It meant 13 kilometres of new city sewers and 11kms of new culverts, in place of rudimentary sewers from the time the old water channels were built over in the 18th century.
Most importantly, it got a cleaner harbour, one that’s increasingly home to diverse sports and amenity pastimes, and kinder to people, birds fish, fauna and flora, too.
The main drainage was finished in 2004/05, just in time for Cork’s European City of Culture year, 2005, and that year’s cultural celebrations were kick-started with a fireworks display from the river, marking a point when the tide began to flow in favour of river enjoyment, promenading once more (new walks now linking up from the Lee Fields, Mardyke to the Marina, to Rochestown and Passage West) and proper sanitation. In a sense, it was when the river was given back to the people.
An eloquent 2009 submission to have Cork harbour nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (see www.corkharbour.ie) notes the port’s centuries-long history of provisioning ships, from the late 18th century, and also picked up on its emergence as a place for pleasure activities, with the world’s oldest yacht club, founded in 1720, on Haulbowline, with a direct lineage today to the Royal Cork Yacht Club (RCYC) in Crosshaven.
Not too far off a 300th anniversary, “the harbour’s still the lifeblood of Cork,” says RCYC manager, Gavin Deane, who adds that long link has attracted thousands of visitors to the harbour down the decades.
Water-borne activities in and out of the harbour, inlets and along the Lee, are enjoying a renaissance today, from RIB visits and dolphin watching to kayaks and currachs doing circumnavigation of the city’s central island: the Meitheal Mara guide to bridges, portage, and weirs to navigate is punningly called Corkumnaviation.
The river’s water-quality clean-up saw the first Rás Mór, or Ocean to City race, on the Lee getting afloat in 2005, voyaging from the mouth of the harbour to the city centre by City Hall, some 15 nautical miles of arm muscle-sapping marathon rowing, paddling and kayaking.
It was modelled along the lines of London’s Great River Race, a 21-mile river marathon for traditional boats organised by the inspirational and inclusive Meitheal Mara and Naomhóga Chorcaí.
By the Ras’s tenth anniversary last year, it had hundreds of participants and sundry craft and crews in the day’s civic event, with thousands of spectators lining the river and estuarine route. But, nothing new under the sun? Back in 1902, a rowing race on the Lee to mark the Great Exhibition saw 80,000 spectators line the Marina to witness the International Cup Race.
Also back in the swim was the city’s Lee Swim, rekindled in cleaner waters in 2005, after a very long absence — in fact, the previous swim had been 100 years ago, in 1914.
It’s continued now since 2005, and is one of the top ten open-water swimming events in the country, tapping into the surge in marathon, duathlon and triathlon events nationwide. The event last year had 400 togging off, doing 1,700 metres downriver and 300 metres upriver, and this year’s race is on July 12, with celebrations to mark its 100th anniversary.
In a bit of a historical flourish with a water-borne future, last year’s tourism Gathering saw the first Rebel Raid, a sort of Táin Chorcaí/Viking-like flotilla of sailing and oar-powered craft tour Cork harbour, over three days, camping out. Historically, given its position at a critical Atlantic crossing point, Cork harbour was one of the best defended ports in the world, with towers, forts and canon aplenty.
Now, with defences down, it’s pitching to be one of the most embracing.
* As a boating enthusiast, the Marine Minister Simon Coveney is well-placed to oversee the development of the harbour, Tommy Barker explains.
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