This piece was written in late July 2014 for The Sunday Independent, but was never subsequently published by the paper. Seven months later, the Independent ran a piece about the city which, in my view, was far too grim.
It didn’t stack up with the reality of the hard yards a great many people in Waterford, mostly behind the scenes, were putting in six years ago to make the now fully funded North Quay/Michael Street project possible.
And with a further funding application for the O’Connell Street/Cultural Quarter reported upon by my Waterford News & Star colleague Darren Skelton this week, it’s clear to me that we’ve finally got around that long awaited, much anticipated corner. With a better future now vouched for, it felt like a good time to retrieve a story which, in hindsight, now underlines just how far we’ve come…
JULY 2014: The vacant shop units on Waterford’s Michael Street give visible illustration to the ongoing difficulties facing Ireland’s oldest city.
A thriving industrial hub for more than two centuries and, dating back to medieval times, a key trade link between Ireland and Britain, Waterford has known too many dark days in its recent history.
And we who were born here, who work here and live here have had our fill of them.
Where to begin? Given the demise of Waterford Crystal, which once employed 3,500 people, the closure of the Foundry, Guinness’s withdrawal from its city centre brewery and the pressures facing staff at Bausch + Lomb has left many locals wondering who in Government cares about Port Láirge.
An attempt to inject some impetus into the Michael Street area was, as is so often the case within the political sphere, revealed less than a fortnight before the Local Elections.
Almost a decade after the proposed creation of a Dundrum Centre-style development was shot down by An Bord Pleanála, NAMA hopes to attract a joint venture partner to turn this long-mooted retail development into bricked and mortared reality.
But, as many have rightly pointed out since this news broke, to fill any hi-spec units with customers shall require a considerable employment boost extending well beyond those who may benefit from construction and future in-store work there.
“If you build it, they will come”. Oh, if only that was so.
Frustration with Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Labour was made manifest by city voters on May 23rd, as Sinn Féin captured four seats, while former SF Councillor Joe Kelly was elected on an independent ticket.
Indeed, the new ‘Metropolitan Area’, which now includes Tramore, Dunmore East and Passage East, returned eight independent candidates, with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil each taking three seats.
Labour, mirroring the national picture, was eviscerated in the city, catastrophically taking only one seat from 32 in the merged City and County authority.
Sinn Féin’s success came as no great surprise locally, and certainly didn’t catch their poll topper John Hearne unawares.
“We started this campaign years ago,” said Cllr Hearne, who will hold Mayoral office come 2016.
“We decided that all our candidates had to have put in at least five years of community activism in order to run for the party, and by last Christmas, we’d already dropped 130,000 leaflets dropped around the city.
“We’d been working full time at this for a long time, and there had to be a positive result at the end of it and that’s what we got, and we’ve six seats in the city and county now which proves that.”
In a Dáil constituency which has traditionally returned at least one left-leaning candidate, both Sinn Féin and the strong independent grouping hoovered up what was once a solid city-based Labour vote.
“If you looked at who Labour ran in the city, you’re talking about mostly civil servants, they were doing a part-time job, a job they were doing half-heartedly as far as I’m concerned and they were all in their mid-50s,” contended John Hearne.
“It was an open goal for us, and after they’d sold out on every key principle they had, we knew we just had to stick with it, and we did.
People in Waterford know that Sinn Féin is a normal, everyday ordinary working party, they didn’t want the same old spiffs sitting in City Hall and the election result proved that.”
While the county-based vote revealed that traditional support for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil remains solid, the appetite for change in the city, for some form of positive action, has been undeniable for more than a decade.
The Celtic Tiger didn’t leave too deep a paw print in Waterford, and had it not been for the presence of Martin Cullen (pictured) at the cabinet table, the M9 motorway to Dublin would almost certainly not have been delivered.
But to suggest that the people of Waterford are sitting on their hands, merely waiting for an economic white knight to gallop down that welcome stretch of asphalt from Leinster House, is both untrue and unfair.
The regeneration of the ancient heart of the city via the Viking Triangle project, home to ‘a thousand years of history in a thousand footsteps’, has provided the city with a museum offering superior to any other on this island.
Directly opposite these three distinctive museums stands the House of Waterford Crystal, a much smaller version of the thriving ‘Glass’ factory at Kilbarry, which has drawn tourists into the city centre in an enticing and welcome manner.
Several former Waterford Crystal staff, still awaiting their pension payments, have got on with life as best they can in the interim, some maintaining their cutting and blowing skills, while others have re-skilled.
Yet, for some reason, their stories are rarely the ones non-Waterfordians read about in the national press, thus, in my view, thoroughly distorting exterior perceptions about living and working in this city.
Take Noel Browne, for example, who worked in Waterford Crystal from the age of 17 in 1974 through to its closure in 2009 but is now a full-time, award-winning photographer.
“What’s going on with Bausch + Lomb isn’t new, unfortunately – you can date a lot of this back to when there was a strike at Waterford Crystal in 1999 when wage cuts and reduced hours kicked in not only with us but at other factories out in the industrial estate, and sure we all know what’s happened since.
“But what hasn’t helped is the very unfair perception about Waterford in the national media; it just seems to be consistently negative, which is a shame. We’re both from here, we both work here and we’ve lived all our lives here. We know what it’s like – it’s a beautiful city.”
Noel (pictured) added: “Being out and about at events and shoots over the past six years, you get talking to people and I’d seen signs of things slowly moving in the right direction over the last year to 18 months, but Bausch + Lomb has put a cloud on things again. Waterford was just being spoken up again, the mood had definitely improved, but here we are again.”
His former Crystal colleague Tony Hayes, one of the last apprentices taken in by ‘The Glass’ in the late 1980s, was a co-founder of Irish Handmade Glass, which has been housed in the stunningly appointed Kite Studio, adjacent to ChristChurch Cathedral, since January 2011.
“There are six of us in the company, three of us cutting glass, three of us blowing,” said Tony as he wrapped up a sculpted trout for a waiting customer.
Business, he told me, is “pandemonium, off the scale – we’ve never seen anything like it”.
Corporate business has greatly picked up over the past six months, and since paving work was completed outside the studio, also situated in the Viking Triangle, footfall has also increased. “Things are busy now, and that’s the best way to be.”
When asked about the notion of Waterford being the most disregarded of Irish cities, Tony Hayes didn’t mince his words.
“We have been forgotten about. Absolutely and utterly. We haven’t got a minister, and from what we’ve been hearing the last few weeks, nobody wants to step up to be a minister, and that to me is just ridiculous. James Connolly must be turning in his grave with that kind of talk.
“The current Government has just left this city fall asunder; the hospital has been destroyed too. Waterford is literally on its knees and right now it appears we’ve thrown all our eggs into the one basket – tourism - but tourism starts at the end of April and it ends in September.
“We need something else for the other six months, and that requires some broader thinking by the decision makers.
“We’ve a fabulous city, and it’s a pity that message doesn’t seem to be getting out to a wider audience, because there’s so much potential here. We’ve a fabulous Institute of Technology, I went there myself, I loved it there, and that ought to be given full University status as soon as possible.
“We need more local start-up companies; anyone wanting to set up business in Waterford needs more support and that’s what we should be concentrating on, not the multinational corporations from the States and Canada who tend to up sticks once their tax breaks are gone.”
Beating that positive drum is something which Waterford has not done in a coherent and sufficiently vocal manner, according to Michael Garland of the Waterford Business Group.
“There’s a ton of good stuff going on in the background here, but there’s nobody fighting that corner for us nationally. Unfortunately, we just don’t get good PR when the truth of the matter is that it’s completely different from that.”
Mr Garland added: “It’s hard to avoid the thought that Waterford has been disregarded, but that’s not to say that that perception can’t be changed. We’ve a fabulous city, great beaches, a great coastline, it’s a great place to live and work.
“We know what’s needed but we just don’t physically have the people to deliver these projects and get them over the line, and we have to ask ourselves why it is that Waterford isn’t being given the chance that our other cities have been given.”
Michael Garland also feels that the people of Waterford have got to be “more positive about their city” too.
“We tend to be a little down on ourselves in Waterford here, and that’s a big thing that we have to tackle, no-one else can do that for us,” he said.
“We’ve got to buy into Waterford locally which in turn I feel can help more tourists and potential investors to buy into the city in turn and turn those potential wins a lot of us are currently working on into big successes.”
On the hospitality front, business has picked up over the past year or so according to Mags Darrer of Dooley’s Hotel, with the vast majority of customer feedback offering resonance to that PR drum Michael Garland referenced.
“There’s so much work going on in the city, particularly in the Viking Triangle right now – the work had to start somewhere – and we know the Council has plans to regenerate some of the outlying streets from the city centre, including O’Connell Street directly behind us here. That will come in time and we’ll welcome it of course, but the work that’s ongoing is not going unnoticed when guests are checking out.”
Ms Darrer (pictured) said: “While some aspects of the business are down, we are seeing a growth, which naturally we’re pleased about. And the better the city is presented, then our hope is that that will be reflected in our levels of business.
“Our doors are open. Waterford’s doors are open. And that’s something we’ve got to spell out loudly, clearly and repeatedly.” And so say all of us who live in, work in, and love Waterford.
NOVEMBER 2020: Minster for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Darragh O’Brien TD has today [November 10th] announced the approval of €80.6m in Urban Regeneration and Development Fund (URDF) support for the Waterford North Quays project.
A total package of €110.6m will go towards the regeneration project with €30 million having been committed by the Department of Transport, through the National Transport Authority.
“Today’s Government approval represents one of the single biggest investments ever in the South East,” he said.
“The North Quays project is the largest commercial development in Waterford and currently the largest urban regeneration project in the country.
“For too long Waterford City and the South East region has suffered from underdevelopment and underinvestment. Waterford’s North Quays in particular, an eight hectare site pivotally located in the centre of the region’s City has remained derelict for decades; it has hindered the integration, sustainable development and attractiveness of the City and consequently the surrounding area.
“This project is a very good example of helping a region to thrive. It’s expected that 1,500 new full time jobs directly related to the construction phase will be created, with private development delivering nearly 2,300 full time jobs by 2026 and the creation of a further 4,500 indirect jobs in the wider community.”
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