By Paul Murphy.
Drogheda regeneration was at the centre of a lively Festival of Ideas discussion at Droichead Arts Centre, where residents, planners and experts debated the future of the town.
At a total of 13 words the title of the conference on the future of Drogheda in the Droichead Arts Centre on Thursday may have seemed unwieldy but it nevertheless produced an avalanche of opinions, suggestions and proposals not only from an enthusiastic audience willing to engage with the process of “doing something great for Old Lady Drogheda” but also getting the views of an expert panel.
It was titled “Festival of Ideas: Urban Renewal – Imagining a better future for Drogheda City” and it was well introduced by Drogheda man Dom Gradwell and facilitated by that well-known Boyneside broadcaster and communicator Gavin Duffy. The event was aided by Fitz Scientific, Louth County Council, Love Drogheda, The Arts Centre and the committee of Drogheda Vacancy and Heritage Forum. Dom Gradwell said that there were a lot of good things going on in Drogheda at the moment and along the way he paid tribute to environmental journalist the late McDonald whom he described as a fearless voice on planning issues.
The expert panel included Adrian Watson, CEO from 2016 of the ratepayer-funded Aberdeen Business District Improvement organisation, conservationist and Dublin city planning officer Kevin Duff of An Taisce, Ali Harvey, a community-led regeneration specialist, and Bryan Coughlan, senior executive officer, Louth County Council.
Gavin Duffy introduced Bryan Coughlan who said it had been a great week in Louth County Council. The Westgate Vision project had been in the pipeline for some time now and it had now received €7.5m in funding from the Department of Housing. Louth County Council was providing €5.5m to that, a substantial investment for a local authority. That will cover the area from the junction of Fair Street and Georges Street, down Georges Street to the junction of West Street and Georges Street, wrapping around a new public plaza. The old West Gate entrance to the town will be marked out and the old medieval wall will be opened up with a walkway down to the banks of the Boyne.
He predicted that it would be “phenomenal” when the project came to fruition along with the €10m investment in Westgate House. And there were also other projects on the way. “We have an awful lot in the pipeline for Drogheda”.
Ali Harvey said that when she was working on a private project in Derry some time ago she found that the walled towns of Ireland “weren’t talking to each other” and she and others had set up the Walled Towns Network. There had been a lot of neglect in Irish town centres and there had been a lot of out-of-town development which had just kept going. One of the problems was the recession which meant that the (money) tap was turned off. The Walled Towns Network had received funding of €2m and then €2m “but then literally nothing overnight”. There was a great shortage of baseline data and she had got the universities involved in producing that.
Gavin Duffy said Drogheda had an exploding population and he wondered why Drogheda could not be made a single city.
A woman in the audience said she had moved to Drogheda 26 years ago “and I absolutely fell in love with the town, the architecture, the structure, everything is absolutely great but it is also the amazing community spirit we have here”. It had given her so much joy over 26 years to be part of incredible things in the town. “we have so much to offer here”.
She believed that the community could do so much that the local authority would not have the budget to do.
A man of 27 said he could not see a future for himself in the Drogheda area because it seemed as if “nothing is done for the people who actually live here and want to live here”. The two local authorities in Louth and Meath seemed to regard Drogheda as “a commuter town for Dublin”. He said there was no infrastructure being put in place for the houses that were being built in the town.
Gavin Duffy said that he had walked Trimgate Street in Navan and Clanbrassil Street in Dundalk and it seemed to him that Drogheda commercial centre was harder hit by vacancy and dereliction.
Adrian Watson, who is also a former police commander, told Duffy that Union Street in Aberdeen once had a vacancy rate of 24pc, the highest in the country, and that was after enjoying 40-50 years of prosperity. They had been proud to call themselves the oil and gas capital. They had pulled back the vacancy rate and it was now at 10.6pc – that had been done by gathering the evidence. It also involved a lot of pain. He couldn’t believe that Drogheda didn’t have the necessary data. That lack led to politics and all sorts of opinions and those with the loudest voices getting all the attention.
That might not be the best thing for any town. A lot of organisations, instead of clinging to their culture of working in isolation, got together in collaboration. People had to leave their egos at the door the best way they could. The “joined-upness” was now a priority. They had managed to get £200m into a city centre master plan. In Aberdeen they “did collaboration” with the local authorities and they did it “behind doors”. They had got the experts in, got the data and he and others decided on some very innovative approaches.
