Warning over lack of parking and hotels in cruise ship town of Cobh

Schools in Cobh are to be asked to allow tourists to use their car parks over the summer months amid fears that the harbourside town will not be able to cater for an expected increase in visitor numbers.

Cobh is expecting a boom in visitors as a record 100-plus cruise ships are booked to dock in the town this year and following Spike Island’s success at being declared the best tourism destination in Europe.

The concerns were expressed by Cobh Tourism and Cobh & Harbour Chamber of Commerce and the local hospitality sector in general regarding “the dire lack” of hotels and B&B beds in the area.

Members of Cobh Tourism met with local county councillors to discuss the issue prior to a municipal district council meeting in the town.

As a result, councillors are also hoping to change the County Development Plan to allow a developer to build a 200-bed hotel on land the local authority owns in the town.

Cllr Cathal Rasmussen asked council officials to survey the town and see if they could find additional parking spaces. He also won backing from colleagues to write to local secondary schools seeking them to provide parking when pupils are on their summer break.

He said businesses were also asking their staff not to park in the town centre.

Cllr Kieran McCarthy told the meeting that Cobh had just 250 hotel and B&B beds, which was way less than somewhere like Kinsale.

He said he recently met with a developer who was anxious to build a hotel in the town and five acres should be set aside for it at a 57-acre site owned by the council at Newtown, near Cobh Pirates rugby club.

“If we’re serious about keeping tourism growing we need this. Cobh Tourism is surprised we haven’t earmarked land for a hotel in the development plan. In peak months last year Bella Vista [hotel] was turning away up to 40 people a night because it was full,” said Cllr McCarthy.

Cllr Rasmussen, Cllr Anthony Barry and Cllr Sinead Shepperd agreed with him.

The latter said Cllr McCarthy’s proposal had to be taken seriously.

Cllr Rasmussen said the Newtown site could easily accommodate a hotel because 35 acres was set aside for housing and a further five acres each for a sports club and allotments.

He said that if the developer applied for planning permission councillors would have to vote for a material contravention of the County Development Plan to rezone five acres for the hotel development to proceed.

Meanwhile, Cllr Rasmussen said that the council needed to do something to improve roads in the town centre ahead of the tourism season.

Council engineers said it was “fair to say” that a lot of the streets in the town needed attention.

Cllr Shepperd said she’d recently got a call from a Limerick county councillor who had visited the Cobh area and commented on the bad state of its roads.

She said senior officials in County Hall were still celebrating the Spike Island award and it was therefore time they provided adequate road maintenance budgets for the town.