Cork council merger: Review offers a timely opportunity

Former UCC President Gerry Wrixon welcomes the Cork Local Government Review

I very much welcome the Cork Local Government Review currently being undertaken.

Structures that have been in place for more than 100 years certainly need re-examining. Do they meet the current and future needs of the population?

Do they position the region to take advantage of opportunities for growth and development in a 21st century world? Recommendations designed to improve and enhance the lot of the citizens should be the key driver of the review and, as the implications are far reaching, it is important to get it right.

Cork city’s current boundaries encompass a population of some 119,000, whereas the total built-up areas, as well as contiguous suburbia, contain over 200,000 people. The suggestion from the City Council is to extend the boundary of the city in order to include satellite towns such as Blarney, Carrigaline, and Carrigtwohil. This would result in a city with a population of 235,000, as well as providing space for projected expansion to 500,000 by 2050.

In my opinion, an objective and independent review of Local Government arrangements in Cork city and county represents an historic opportunity. An expanded city, one containing a critical mass of both population and important infrastructure can act as a magnet for industry, commerce and tourism. Cork could become a European metropolis in its own right and the second major pillar of growth and expansion in the state.

As well as a population of more than 200,000, a modern city, with ambition to grow, also needs basic infrastructure to be an attractive location to induce modern industries, as well as their employees to locate there. On this score Cork is remarkably well served.

It has a good road and rail network, an international airport and an extensive harbour with deep water berthing facilities at Ringaskiddy. It has a major university with a wide variety of faculties and a highly respected institute of technology which together cater for more than 35,000 students.

It is a major medical centre with a large well equipped acute hospital coordinating its services with other sizable public and private hospitals. It also has a solid industrial base centered on information technology, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and food and drink processing.

This means that the ingredients required to catapult Cork to its next stage of growth are all present. The key question is what more is needed to achieve this ambitious objective?

Firstly an engaged and energetic City Council needs to recognise that growth of industry and commerce within the enlarged city will be based on knowledge based industries. Also, that existing, locally based, strengths in these industries need to be proactively leveraged.

Other centres, both in UCC and CIT, are being developed in other areas of industrial relevance such as software engineering. These activities represent a major advantage for the city and, working together with the national development agencies IDA and EI, need to be relentlessly leveraged to fast track Cork’s growth.

Secondly, it needs to be realised that people who work in these knowledge- based industries, and indeed most tourists, are interested in experiencing an exciting and culturally rich urban environment — one in which they can socialise in attractive locations, as well asenjoy the wide variety of cultural and sporting activities available to them.

More effort and resources need to be invested into making Cork an appealing, safe and liveable city. Older parts of the inner city need to be tastefully restored and strict architectural standards should be required of new developments.

An enlarged, growing and vibrant Cork would also constitute a second and much needed pillar of development in Ireland. Dublin is currently the only such hub and daily grows larger and out of proportion to the rest of the country. This is not healthy for Dublin or indeed for the country as a whole.

Ireland needs another major centre of development. Capital cities in most small European countries all have other lively and vigorous counterparts; Lisbon with Oporto, Brussels with Antwerp, and The Hague has Amsterdam, all of them major European cities in their own right. Indeed, one has to go all the way to Albania to find a small country which has not developed a major hub outside of its capital city.

Because of its geographical position and the welcome growth of links with Belfast, Dublin appears to be more and more oriented to trade, commerce and cultural links with the UK. This presents an opportunity for Cork to capitalise on its southerly position to become the gateway to France and especially the cities of Rennes, Bordeaux, and Nantes with which it had extensive historical trading and cultural links.

The role of the city council in an expanded city, led ideally by an elected mayor to be the public face of the city, is to be proactive in robustly leveraging the knowledge and infrastructural strengths of the city to put it on an ambitious growth curve.

At the same time it needs to support and reinforce its artistic, cultural, and sporting elements and, via careful and sensitive developments, make Cork an attractive, safe and exciting city in which to live. The planning and realisation of ambitious new infrastructural projects should also fall within its ambit.

An example could be the provision of a light rail linking Docklands to CIT via downtown, UCC, and CUH. These diverse activities contrast greatly with those of the county council, which has its strengths in rural development and the provision of services to the many towns and villages throughout what is, after all, the largest county in the country. Consequently, any notion that a single council could deal with the very different demands of the city and county does not seem realistic and would not serve either the city or county well.

I have attempted in this brief article to give a flavour of the optimistic vision I have for the development of Cork in a new and expanded guise. The challenge for the City Council will be to shrug off the old cloak of provincialism and to embrace the challenge of becoming the second metropolitan pillar of development in our country.

Not the ‘real capital’, to be sure, but a second city of which we can all be proud.

Gerry Wrixon is former president of UCC