The first few working days of the year are always a trial but, for me this year it is proving more difficult than most. I’m determined though, to start off on a positive note.
However, even a quick glance around our once beautiful town is enough to tell you that there are huge problems with urban decay that urgently need to be addressed.
Hopefully 2022 will be the year that local and central government get the Port Access Northern Cross Route across the line to make way for the thousands of new homes needed and to divert heavy goods traffic away from the narrow streets of the town but year after year there seems to be a new reason for not doing so.
Drogheda could be turned back into an attractive place to live, work and visit but it will take a lot of work and commitment to achieve that after so many years of neglect.
Take a five minute walk from the Tholsel in any direction and everywhere you look you’ll come across shocking scenes of dereliction which have been allowed to fester for so long now that they have become the backdrop to our lives.
Narrow West Street is the worst of many examples of neglect in the town centre. What was once a pleasant entrance to the town from the Western side is now a scene of destruction and dereliction.
This dreadful plague of urban decay started with the disgraceful destruction in 1989 of the old Drogheda Grammar School buildings in Laurence Street which had been a seat of learning for over 300 years.
The school moved to more spacious accommodation on the Mornington Road in 1975 and three years later the buildings were bought by a group of local “investors” trading as DGS Ltd. who neglected the listed buildings for years.
They allowed the bujildings to become derelict before they illegally bulldozed them early one Sunday morning in July 1989.
The greed driven destruction of the Laurence Street buildings was just the beginning of a trend that has resulted in huge swathes of the town’s architectural heritage being lost forever.
The brutal but seemingly effective business model is to buy property cheap (DGS paid just £70,000 for the Laurence Street buildings in 1978), allow the buildings to fall into disrepair and become an eyesore and possibly dangerous, and you’re likely to get permission for your development on the grounds that anything is better than that.
Things have changed obviously but the local authority still seems powerless to stop this activity which has been repeated time and again in Drogheda leaving scars that in some cases have been there for decades – see the accompanying pictures.
The local authority has a huge part to play in the future of Drogheda and, with their West End Vision and St. Peter’s Place projects we can see that their heart is in the right place, but, so far at least, they don’t seem to be able to do much about the corporate vandalism that is ruining our town.
So much for my positive start to the year.
