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Michael Moynihan: Cork Luas route and distributor road reveal two-tier planning system

Cork’s latest transport plans favour the south while the northside faces roadbuilding through green space and exclusion

Thu, 17 Apr, 2025 - 01:00

It’s been some couple of weeks for infrastructure on Leeside.

In April, we learned about the route planned for the Cork light rail system, or Luas Cork (not Leeas? It was right there). Last week submissions closed for submissions on the new Cork Northern Distributor Road, which aims to alleviate traffic pressure on the northside of the city.

Actually, we’ll come to a sudden halt here with bland terms like ‘infrastructure on Leeside’ and begin describing this a bit more accurately.

These plans are a slap in the face for the northern half of the city, examples of blithe disregard so overt, so blatant, that they’re almost funny. Clearly we’re past the point where subtlety even serves a purpose.

Readers may have noted that the light rail route proposed serves “. . . Munster Technology Institute’s (MTU) main campus at Bishopstown, Cork University Hospital (CUH), University College Cork (UCC), the city centre, Kent train station, Cork docklands, Blackrock and Mahon.” So yes, the light rail will slip across the river at Patrick’s Bridge and run a couple of hundred metres to Kent Station. You will note that the rest of the route serves southern stops and suburbs.

So: a Cork Luas South.

To be fair, at least it won’t be shut off from the denizens of Mayfield and Blackpool and Gurranabraher and Shanakiel. They’ll be able to walk down to MacCurtain St and have a look at the train. Form an orderly line and wave at the people going past, coo over the shiny carriages, gaze in wonder at the tracks. They can hurrah and wave their handkerchiefs and shout ‘long life to your honour’ before slinking away, grateful to have seen their betters.

Give over with the cheerleading. This is a light rail for half the city only.

Consolation prizes are available, though. Isn’t there a new road to consider on the northside?

Kudos here to Dr Eoin Lettice of UCC, who gave this plan the absolute skewering it deserved in these pages recently.

Eoin pointed out here that the route proposed for this Northern Distributor road pancakes one of the few remaining green areas accessible to residents in the Blackpool-Farranree-Dublin Hill areas: Murphy’s Rock.

Locals say Murphy's Rock is an area of outstanding beauty and environmental importance which needs to be preserved for future generations.

Eoin’s piece resonated with many readers of a similar vintage, myself included. My late father brought us up to Murphy’s Rock (always ‘up’, even though the stream itself is at the bottom of a valley), and we picked up the basics of swimming as we splashed in its shallow ponds. Eoin is correct to say that thousands of Cork people have similar memories of strolling out there on a summer’s day and enjoying the surroundings.

No longer. Genius engineers have green areas to cover, like the villains in a Roald Dahl book.

If someone proposed paving over Fitzgerald’s Park, or diverting the South Ring Rd through Tramore Valley Park, they’d be ridiculed and run out of office. If they propose paving over Murphy’s Rock they get a commission

This mindset is easily explained with other examples. Just in the road from Murphy’s Rock, for instance, there’s a flyover with four lanes of traffic going over Blackpool itself — proof, if necessary, that the people designing infrastructure north of the river are contemptuous of that part of the city. It is the kind of road design that went out of fashion decades ago everywhere else in the civilised world, and regarded with a little embarrassment anywhere it survives. But it lives on stubbornly in Cork.

Well, on the northside of Cork.

If you cross the river and head south you are greeted by an entirely different world — one of sensitive construction, of airy designs and welcoming spaces.

Take the plans for Murphy’s Rock, with a road planned to go through it, and compare and contrast those with the tastefully upgraded Marina walkway along the banks of the river.

Or the sweeping vistas at Tramore Valley Park, with its playing fields and curving walkways, nicely landscaped, conveniently located, easily accessible.

It’s as if the northern part of the city doesn’t exist as a real place, but as a kind of Brigadoon which pops out of a cloud every few years so that engineers and planners can try a few experiments

Unfortunately, those experiments have consequences in the real world. I wouldn’t have thought the panjandrums of Cork City Hall were committed fans of Disraeli the novelist, but their works show all the signs of devotion to his great work Sybil — and the famous description of the ‘two nations’ of England: “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws . . .”

Treating the northern part of the city so shabbily is not just a failure of infrastructure and services, it is an abject failure of imagination which betrays northside residents. Having a two-tier system of resources underlines the sense of ‘two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy’, particularly when one of those nations is seriously disadvantaged in comparison with the other.

That is far more serious than any banter, good-humoured or not, between natives of the north and southside. The policy choices behind decisions such as the route of the light rail system or that of the northern distributor road are seriously worrying because of the disrespect for the people they affect — overt disrespect, not implied.

They should make all residents of Cork uncomfortable, as they clearly privilege one part of the city over another

If there are realistic ambitions for Cork as a city — by which I mean realisable aims and achievable targets, not marketing spoofery about the city in future decades — then the light rail system should branch out into the northside. Of course it should. Otherwise it is simply the South Side Choo Choo, nothing else.

The point has been made over and over but bears restating: in the early years of the last century it was possible to get a tram from Blackpool to Douglas, or from Summerhill to Sunday’s Well, as well as from Tivoli to Blackrock.

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In fact, those trams first went into action in the late 1890s. The plan suggests that in today’s Ireland we can’t match a transport system that first functioned not one but two centuries ago.

As for the route of the northern distributor road, its proponents have a choice. Either they stick with their original plan and ruin a priceless natural habitat, or they show some flexibility and sensitivity by rerouting their road around Murphy’s Rock. The difficulty with option b, of course, is it would mean acknowledging an error, something large organisations are notoriously unwilling to do.

I’m sure they’ll do the right thing by the northside. As usual.