Lord Mayor, this is a very exciting project.
Building a people’s park is no easy task; the making of a new public façade for the city at the Kinsale Road Landfill is one full of questions and debates on what it should be physically and symbolically.
The last time a major City Park opened was Fitzgerald’s Park in 1905. Of course there are green spaces scattered across the city but none with the same scale of development as the 160 acre site off Kinsale Road.
In recent months Lord mayor, I set up a Design a Public Park Art competition for schools in the city and received over 200 entries plus recently had a historical walking tour across the site as part of the Council’s Open Day. There is enormous interest in this site and I don’t think we have even begun to really promote this park.
The recent open day led to vast crowds taking an interest in the site. And the one thing that will take this project down is the lack of making this a people’s park. Despite the millions of euros invested in managing and capping the dump, the publicity for the new park really hasn’t left the arena of an open day.
We need large signage at the top of its capped hill, a facebook site, engagement with young families and so on
Recently, Lord Mayor, I was asked before my walking tour of the site what was I going to show on the site…. Mary Murphy’s rubbish.
But walking across the site, one can feel the tension in its sense of place, a place haunted and engineered by its past and teeming with ideas about its future. This is a place where the City’s environment has always been debated.
A 1655 map of the city and its environs marks the site as Spittal Lands, a reference to the original local environment and the backing up of the Trabeg and Tramore rivers as they enter the Douglas channel. The backup created a marshland, where coarse wetland grasses grew.
Fast forward to the 1840s and plans were drawn up for a railway between Cork and Bandon. When it eventually opened to the public on 6 December 1851, part of its design encompassed a nine metres high embankment as it crossed the Tramore River’s floodplain. The track crossed the river initially on a wooden bridge, which in time was replaced by a stone culvert more affectionately known as the Snotty Bridge.
The wetlands began as one of the city’s dump or landfill of sorts way back in 1894. Here a facility was made where the sweepings or ashes of the city would be dropped daily and auctioned to the nearby market gardeners for soil enrichment on a Saturday morning. Protests began but to no avail. It remained as a contentious thorn in the debate about the city’s environment well into the twentieth century.
Indeed, when the site of the 1932 Irish Industrial and Agricultural Fair was disbanded, the city got an official dump site off the Carrigrohane Straight Road. In time, this site in 1971 began to be closed off and once again the process of dumping was speeded up at the Kinsale Road site.
Campaigning began once again, this time by the residents of new estates off South Douglas Road. An article in the Southern Star on 13 July 1974 talks about “ a subsidiary, a kind of Branch of the parent dump” being created.
Of course, there were expansions of the dump in 1990. The reams of newspaper columns, which can be tracked down in the City Library reveal that tensions have run strong for nearly forty years to have the dump closed.
Here is a site where the city can draw on so many themes to promote itself,
A place where the City’s environment has always been in focus
The city’s local history, city’s history, city’s environmental history all interconnect, adding in layers
It is a place of ideas, of opportunity, a place of negotiation, a place of motivation, a place of next steps, a place that needs validation- it has a right to be part of the city
This is a place which changes the city’s gameplan for its future; We need to actively engage people in making the city’s twenty-first century people’s park.
