Cork City Developments: ‘Extend Cork for €500m scheme boost’
Owen O’Callaghan, the managing director of O’Callaghan Properties, one of three Cork-based development firms planning almost €500m of strategic investment projects in the city centre, said the creation of a metropolitan Cork would help the city sell itself globally and attract massive foreign direct investment to fund such major projects.
He was speaking after the firms outlined details of multi-million euro projects earmarked for Cork City which have the potential to create hundreds of construction jobs in the short term and up to 10,000 office jobs over the coming years.
As the Government- appointed Smiddy Group continues its review of Cork’s local government structures, Mr O’Callaghan said a merger of the city and county councils into a single super-council would not necessarily be a good thing.
In today’s Irish Examiner, he says: “Large or single does not always, by definition, signal most efficient. HSE and Irish Water spring to mind in that context.
“If Cork City is to develop a critical mass of projects... it is essential that the city becomes a priority location for FDI investment visits and EI [Enterprise Ireland] activity — to yield the tenants for the kind of office and other facilities envisaged.
“There is a collective, innovative public-private collaborative effort required to ‘sell’ Cork for inward investment.” How that is achieved, he said, will be influenced by the Smiddy group’s recommendations which are due in September.
The group is considering a merger of the city and county councils or Cork’s first boundary extension in more than 50 years.
Mr O’Callaghan said he considered the argument for a merger but said he favours a boundary extension to create a council for a metropolitan Cork zone, and a separate authority to service a huge county area.
He called for “a radical new relationship” between developers, local authorities and State agencies such as the IDA and Enterprise Ireland to attract investment from international funds which are now the main backers of large-scale strategic investment projects, and said economic recovery cannot take place without developers.
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