Michael Moynihan: Finally getting an event centre would be music to the ears

BAM Ireland’s expects work to start on the event centre in Cork in autumn.

 Depeche Mode have released a new album, called Memento Mori.

This is probably not how you envisaged the start of this column, but any time this band is mentioned I cast my mind back to 1982 when I saw them play a concert in Cork City Hall (October 7 on the A Broken Fame tour, for all the pop completists out there).

Fond musical memories:  Depeche Mode.

I was so innocent that I thought they were actually playing the synthesizers themselves, note by note, rather than relying on backing tracks, but it was still a great night. Pop hits, great light show, crowd in high good humour.

I mention this event from the mid-Cretaceous because during the week a couple of people’s adventures on the contemporary live music scene came across my radar.

The two people who went to Limerick for the Movies and Musicals Concert, for instance, in the University Concert Hall up there. Or maybe the two sisters who went to Dublin for Lizzo at the 3Arena.

The common denominator? In both cases, they went up and down the same night — no big deal when it comes to Limerick, but hauling yourself from Cork up to Dublin and back again the same night is fair cutting. Completely understandable, given the price of hotel rooms in the capital, but as a post-concert proposition it’s enough to give anyone pause and say, “another time, maybe”.

The eye-watering cost of Dublin hotel rooms is not quite the issue I want to focus on but it helps to bring the key point into sharper relief. Namely, are people in Cork missing out significantly because of the absence of a medium-sized concert venue? The kind of venue which would accommodate Movies and Musicals one evening, say, and Lizzo the following evening?

At first glance this might seem to be the very first among first-world problems, complaining that you can’t leave your fireside to take in a concert at six o’clock and be home before the late news. Yes, there are far more pressing concerns in the country, and far more important things to be doing. To quote Sean Connery in The Untouchables, though, I’m not doing them right now.

I can hear people pleading the case of Live At The Marquee in Cork, and it’s true that LATM has been doing a terrific job providing bands and singers on Leeside for years.

But that’s a time-specific series of concerts. The specificity of those dates is an obvious constraint when it comes to acts touring at different times of the year. And with all due respect to the Marquee, which your columnist has enjoyed immensely, it is not a bespoke performance space.

Ed Sheeran on stage at Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

Neither is Páirc Uí Chaoimh, which has featured large-scale concerts in the last couple of years with the likes of Ed Sheeran involved. The acts which fill a stadium are few and far between these days, and, almost by definition, not the kinds of artists I’m referring to.

(See above re: Lizzo, Depeche Mode, etc.)

City Hall, where yours truly bopped along to ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ all those years ago, is always a possibility as a venue, of course. On that note kudos to those seeking to convert our civic facilities into a beach, per a release which circulated this week which stated that we can look forward to “... SUN & SEA: An award-winning opera performance watched from above, performed on an indoor beach at Cork’s City Hall”.

A worthwhile experiment? Absolutely.

A medium-term solution to our medium-sized gap in facilities? Not remotely.

What makes this absence bite a little bit sharper is some recent news of the National Concert Hall in Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, an impressive venue that is now being upgraded.

However, there has been a little hiccup in this work in the last couple of weeks, with the announcement that PwC has been hired to examine a substantial rise in costs on the project.

The upgrade was originally estimated to cost €80m when it was first announced in 2018, but the bat signal has gone up for PwC because — this being Ireland, and the apparent inevitability of costs rising for capital projects — there appears to be a €100m increase in the estimated cost of upgrading the NCH. This is the kind of increase which, even with the blithe attitude to costs that is a hallmark of the Irish nation, tends to lead to a review.

Yet at least the NCH exists. It can be improved but it doesn’t have to be built from scratch. It is not a notional zone, an intangible aspiration of air and announcements, but a real venue.

In other words, it is the exact opposite to our very own comparable spot here in Cork. 

The event centre, which lives only in sod-turning photo opportunities and sarcastic anniversaries.

That venue would serve our purposes perfectly. Just the right size. Just the right place. Just not the right time, apparently. It’s deeply depressing to Google the term “Cork Event Centre” because the milestones which pop up leave the reader frowning.

Go back 12 months and we were told that construction would start at the end of 2022, but that changed last October, when Eoin English reported here that detailed design work by Live Nation and BAM was taking longer than expected, with: “construction (is) expected to begin in the first half of 2023 and will take two years to complete.”

Last December Elaine Loughlin reported Micheál Martin TD sounding a warning: “I’m not going to make any predictions on it because it’s been an issue that has dragged on for quite a considerable length of time. I think we are beginning to see the light now, the company has shown its commitment by doing the detailed design and when it gets to the detailed design stage we should be in a position to start construction.”

Last month Cork City Council chief executive Ann Doherty was reported by local radio as saying the design process would be completed at the end of Quarter 2 this year, with construction to start at the beginning of Quarter 3. Just this week Eoin English reported that BAM, which won the 2014 tender for State aid to build the centre, said it expects to start building this autumn.

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The two-year build envisaged would mean finishing in 2025 — and missing out, unfortunately, on the tenth anniversary of the famous sod-turning back in 2016. A blow to those of us who would have liked the symmetry, but a step forward for the city as a whole.

Hopefully.

That decade of missed concerts and gigs is still a shame, though. It means a generation of Cork kids have gone through much of their teens or 20s without getting to a medium-sized gig in their hometown outside Live At The Marquee. Not the cruellest blow they could have suffered, true, but it’s still a failure.

Roll on Quarter 3. As Depeche Mode said, just never let me down again.