Speakers outline vision for Cork

CORK’S business community yesterday stepped up a gear to give it positive ‘Second City’ status — after Cork has slipped behind investment levels and disposable income in other Irish cities.

Closer support from businesses for the local-authority-led development plan for Cork up to 2020, CASP, was necessary to drive the city on, declared John Bowen, chairman and chief executive of the Bowen Group. He was speaking at the Moving Cork Along seminar.

He argued that the success of Cork “is of national as well as local importance”. A counter-weight to the pull of the Dublin region was needed, and while other cities too aspired to second city status “Cork could be an alternative reference point to Dublin for Limerick, Waterford and even Galway.” The Cabinet had supported strategic investments in Dublin and Cork too needed a major national project to kick-start further growth, he said.

Such a project was Cork as Capital of Culture in 2005. “We've got to make sure it is top drawer,” he said. “Visitors must be impressed, but there is a risk if it is not successful of an own-goal.

“Success is not a given, there is an opportunity we must grasp and convert it into a reality.”

Economist Colin Hunt of Goodbody Stockbrokers, also speaking at the packed seminar organised by the Institute of Bankers jointly with Cork Chamber of Commerce, said Cork appeared to have benefited least of all the cities from the Celtic Tiger.

It had recently slipped behind the five other main cities in disposable income over the past seven or eight years, he revealed.

At the start of the Celtic Tiger era, Cork would have been ahead of Limerick and Waterford in terms of prosperity, but complacency had allowed the city to stagnate, he said. It was in the interest of the economy as a whole to have more balanced development, and the business community and others “should have dreams of making Cork a competitor to Dublin,” asserted Mr Hunt.