A raft of ideas to capitalise on the ‘blue economy’

As a Harbour resident and a boating enthusiast, the Marine Minister Simon Coveney is well-placed to oversee the progress in plans being made for his maritime backdoor, he tells Tommy Barker

ON a single square kilometre of Cork, €150m to €200m will be expended over the next five years, as its harbour is poised for one of its biggest investments in 100 years, says Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney.

Facilities are being put in place for thousands of private sector marine, research and energy-related jobs and tourism attractions. The critical mass of investment will include the cleaning up of an embarrassing blot on the landscape on Haulbowline Island, at a cost of €40m, in the midst of one of the world’s largest natural harbours.

“2014 is the ‘move year’ for Cork and 2015 will be the ‘move year’ for Cobh and Haulbowline, with projects worth tens of millions already coming out of the ground,” says Minister Coveney, who is a Cork harbour resident, a sailor, and a passionate believer in the maritime. He is enthusiastic about the ‘blue economy,’ with its vast potential, of up to €6bn a year nationally by 2020, from €2.6bn today, as well as the scope in Cork harbour.

“Cork’s harbour is going to be transformed in the next five years, and we’ll see a lot of that happening in the next two years,” he says. This has come about thanks to a “a broad group of like-minded people all with a shared vision, one that will be delivered, about making Cork the maritime hub of Ireland and, arguably, of Europe.”

There is a raft of initiatives in the public and private sectors, including the 1,050-person naval service, as it broadens its remit into education and maritime, energy and telecoms research; the maritime college, NMCI, which trains 1,500 people a year, the catalyst of emerging research clusters like IMERC, the Irish Marine Energy Research Centre, involving UCC, the Navy and CIT.

Plus, there’s the €15m, 50,000 sq ft Beaufort Research Laboratory, nowunder construction, which will hold the world’s largest ocean-energy research tank, along with cluster/incubation units at Ringaskiddy planned and seed-funded via IMERC, which can support thousands of jobs. “Confirmation of significant, new private sector investment and jobs is imminent, with marine companies wanting to locate onto that site and it will become a big employer in my view,” he says.

Many institutions and fledgling companies are clustering in the Ringaskiddy area and Minister Coveney compares the potential to the jobs already in situ at the likes of the IT and financial cluster in Cork’s City Gate and Mahon suburb, where thousands of jobs have come from the likes of EMC, Dell, SolarWinds, etc.

“We’ll see that sort of cluster emerge around IMERC in maritime research and innovation, in marine engineering, in ocean energy,” says Coveney. A research collaboration, called MaREI, between six Irish colleges, has been funded to the tune of €30m by Science Foundation Ireland. It will involve 58 private companies, with significant State investment. It’s designed to attract top PhD students and researchers from Europe and further afield, and “just as Cork is seen as a centre for pharma and biopharmara, the top companies in the world in these marine sectors will want to come here, too.”

There are indicators as to how open Cork harbour is to progress, Minister Coveney says — such as the three enormous wind turbines being built at a cost of €30m to help existing pharma firms cut energy costs. “Some people don’t like them, others love them and I think they’re fantastic. It is a dramatic change, it says ‘here you see a place that’s modern and open to progress,’ where you can build significant infrastructure and where planning can be facilitated and which people will accept if it is done properly,” he says.

The pre-Christmas planning application for Haulbowline’s transformation, and for an EPA licence, hasn’t had a single objection. “Before, we had thousands signing petitions and on marches to demand change and investment. This now is an extraordinary endorsement of what people want done.”

The €40m spend, once given the green light and the EPA licence, will tackle the unsightly — and contaminated — east tip on what’s basically a porous landfill site, the Minister says, as well as the south tip (he gives credit to environmental campaigner Tony Lowes for pushing the full island remediation agenda) and remnants of the ISPAT steel plant, with funds also going into repairing the existing short bridge from Ringaskiddy to Haulbowline, by the Rocky Island crematorium. “It’s hoped work will start later this year, but it will be this time next year before we will witness the heavy work, and the physical transformation of that site,” he says.

Once membranes are in place and dangerous material removed from the Haulbowline site, it will be sealed with another membrane, grassed, and landscaped. “When you consider what people in Cobh have had to put up with, the least we can do is landscape it properly,” Minister Coveney says. It’s due to have a public plaza, walks, planting and a cross-country running track. A number of navy facilities will be opened to the public and tourists, as well as docks. There’s already a basic naval museum there, plus a Martello tower — and the 360-degree views from the island’s Navy signal station are all-encompassing — a whole new vista. Then, Spike comes into view.

Spike, an island with as many pasts as a crook has aliases, from monastic pieties to a military fort, an involuntary emigration holding point and bastion of an Empire, has opened up to tourism on a small scale. It has a €4m investment, from Fáilte Ireland and from Cork County Council.

It’s hoped to ultimately have a pedestrian bridge linking it to Haulbowline, but the real visit experience will be by boat, says Coveney, paying tribute to just-retired county manager Martin Riordan for taking both Camden Fort in Crosshaven and Spike into local authority ownership. Selling Cork for tourism and jobs means creating an identity and brand, and Fáilte Ireland has recently positioned Cork’s ‘story’ as that of a city rich in food history, on a river, linking to the harbour and sea and exports.

Part of the Minister’s marine brief and personal vision is to also connect the city to the sea, via the harbour, by creating nodes for easy boat access, from the city centre and Blackrock village, “one of the great underdeveloped parts of the city.” The nodes should include Passage West, Monkstown, Spike, Cobh, and Aghada, where a new pontoon has recently been installed, as counterbalances to well-serviced Crosshaven — a town close to Coveney’s heart. “I was on boats long before I could walk,” says the minister, who, aged 25, was on a round-world sailing fundraiser for Chernobyl Ireland when he came back to Cork, on the death of his father, Hugh, and entered politics in 1998.

Now that he’s a father himself, of three young daughters, what transformation would he like them to witness in Cork harbour, in, say, ten years’ time? “Well, I hope they won’t have to wait for ten years, that’s the first thing. It’s easy to talk about a ten- or even 20-year vision. I’m interested in a three-year vision. In order to make that real, you need momentum and now there’s a group of people able to deliver. I’ve a short window here as Minister, and I’m happy to be judged on this in a few years’ time. In the past, people have over-promised. But, this is all real, all do-able.”

* The harbour's giant elevated wind-turbines will be a sight to behold and dwarf even the Dublin Spire once completed,

explains Tommy Barker.