Taxpayer the real loser in high-rise folly planned for prime city site

THE Government is coming under increasing pressure from the country’s largest property developers to secure direct State funding for infrastructure, to change tax incentives policy and also to change the national roads programme to help fund the so-called Cork docklands and the proposed relocation of Cork port to Ringaskiddy.

Property developers claim to want to develop the ‘docklands’ of the city area. The phrase conjures up images of unused warehouses, squalor, deprivation and empty quays. The project is designed to make us think of regeneration projects in London, Liverpool and elsewhere. But let’s not be taken in by a rhetoric designed to seduce.

Most of the lands in question are not in fact docklands at all but prime city centre residential sites, mainly in the Marina area. The 420 acres are not located in a socio-economically blighted area or an unemployment blackspot, or in a remote and deprived region.