Why I love the industrial estates of Ireland

YOU don’t see them in coffee-table books. They don’t appear on JustAnotherListWebsite.com’s ‘20 Reasons To Visit Ireland Before You Die’. They get a bad press. 

During the day, they are portrayed as the hallmark of the grim, soulless nine-to-five, like in the opening credits of The Office. At night, they are the perfect place for Nidge-types to conduct large, cash-based transactions or for boy-racers to have their New Horizons In Revving planning conventions.

But I still have a soft spot for industrial estates. I’m including ‘business parks’ and the odd retail park in this bracket, too. I’m not including shopping centres. They are awful. Just full of cranky children whining about wanting more Taytos. It’s the unheralded industrial estates I like — not just the newish ones, with the glass-and-aluminium frames and sculptures and work-life balance initiatives, but also the old ones; the ones with brown sandstone walls and crumbling pavements. The ones with plucky poplar trees that someone in the ‘landscaping section’ grudgingly planted years ago and which have defied the odds and now look down on humanity going about its business. In empty lots, the buddleia has a crankily invasive purple beauty all of its own.