The town that thinks of itself as a city has geography on its side, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor.
Sligo may not be a city in strict legal terms, "but that doesn't prevent us from calling it a city", according to Hubert Kearns, who is both the county and borough manager. "We've got to think like a city and act like one, then make our case to the Government."
That's why he welcomes plans for a 14-storey hotel and a 10-storey office block at the Carrowroe roundabout on the N4, two miles south of the town centre. What these landmark buildings would do, he says, is to "announce to people that they're coming into somewhere important".
Sligo aims to establish itself as the undisputed regional capital of the north-west. And it has geography on its side, as Kearns, who is from Co Monaghan, pointed out; Derry is 85 miles to the north and Galway 85 miles to the south, while Enniskillen offers the only local competition.
It also has a spectacular setting, among the finest in Ireland. Situated like an hour-glass between Lough Gill and Sligo Bay, it is serenaded by the Garavogue river and flanked by Knocknarea and Ben Bulben, with the Ox Mountains to the south. This, after all, was W.B. Yeats country.
Another peculiarity of Sligo is its borough boundary, which forms a perfect circle. It was drawn in the 1860s at a radius of 1¼ miles from the old Market Cross, where the statue of Lady Erin now stands. But because the borough and county councils overlap, it's not so much of a problem.
The Mayor of Sligo, former Labour TD Declan Bree, thinks otherwise. He wants to see the boundary extended and Sligo given county borough status, on a par with the State's largest five cities. "We must be seen as a modern, progressive city and not just another provincial town," he says.
The borough's population increased from 17,786 in 1996 to 18,429 in 2002, or just 3.6 per cent, far below the figure of 31,000 which the Government projected for Sligo in 1972. Nonetheless, it is a designated "gateway" under the National Spatial Strategy as the obvious regional capital.
The strategy envisaged that Sligo would grow to 37,761 by 2021, or double the 2002 figure. But the Sligo and Environs Development Plan, adopted last December, looks to Galway as a model and suggests aiming for a population of between 50,000 and 80,000 over the next 20 to 30 years.
Like Galway, Sligo is sprawling. Strandhill, at the foot of Knocknarea, used to be a village, but now it has a population of 1,500 living in suburban housing estates and a 10-acre site in the area recently sold for €1.1 million. Rosses Point is so infested by one-off houses that it qualifies as a suburb.
Just as Galway is a city that still feels like a town, at least in its centre, Sligo is a town that has thought of itself as a city since its heyday as a port in the 19th century. And it has grand civic buildings to prove it, notably the Romanesque Town Hall (now called City Hall) and the Gothic Revival Courthouse.
Both of these buildings have been sensitively renovated by architects Gilroy McMahon and McCullough Mulvin respectively.
The former mental asylum, St Columba's, which dates from 1848, is being converted into a Clarion hotel after years of ill-use as a venue for cider parties and worse.
Galway developer Tom Coyle is responsible for this heroic project, which will bring back to life one of Sligo's most impresssive buildings. Most unusually, the main block is flanked by two chapels, the smaller one for Protestants and the larger, with its Orthodox onion spire, for Catholics.
To the rear of the Clarion, architects Hamilton Young Lawlor Ellison have produced a very fine scheme of student housing in five blocks, with marvellous views north towards Ben Bulben, for the Sligo Institute of Technology nearby. The former RTC has more than 3,000 students, though it could take twice as many.
Seán Martin, the borough council's senior architect, estimates that projects worth €300 million are on-site, with a similar amount in the pipeline. These include a very fine apartments scheme on Markievicz Road, by local architects Rhatigan and Company, which even includes social housing.
Urban renewal in recent years has transformed Rockwood Parade, along the Garavogue, and areas like the old Market Yard. The unsightly Silver Swan hotel at Hyde Bridge is boarded up for demolition to make way for a new hotel and apartment blocks designed by Vincent Hannon and Associates.
Even though it would occupy a promontory site in the river and one of the blocks would rise to 10 storeys, there have been no objections to this scheme, which seems in part to have been inspired by Daniel Libeskind's design for the performing arts centre in Dublin's Grand Canal Docks.
The river is important to Sligo. There's a boomerang-shaped pedestrian walkway over the weir that controls the flow of water from Lough Gill, while a new pedestrian bridge is to be provided as part of the Silver Swan development to connect it to Markievicz Road.
Beside City Hall in Quay Street, the Tower Hotel - built less than 10 years ago - has closed down because it wasn't viable without room for a leisure centre. Competition from the new and remarkably odd-looking Radisson Hotel in Ballincar, on the way out to Rosses Point, probably didn't help either.
The biggest eyesore in Sligo, apart from the damage done by the "Inner Relief Road", is Markievicz House, which occupies a commanding position on Fort Hill, beside the N15. Owned by the North Western Health Board, it has been derelict for years, and demolition is now seen as the only option.
Closer to the town centre, a seven-acre surface car-park site between The Mall and Connaughton Road, owned by the borough council, is to be developed in line with a framework plan drawn up by Dublin architects Sheridan Woods. Its centrepiece will be a new library to serve the Sligo area.
The library would be located on the brow of the hill back-to-back with McCullough Mulvin's award-winning Model Arts and Niland Gallery, which surely raised the bar for contemporary architecture in Sligo when it was opened in 2000. The aim is to develop this area as a new "cultural quarter" for the town.
The biggest redevelopment project involves a proposed shopping precinct on the Wine Street car-park, for which Sligo-born architect Derry O'Connell drew up a master plan. This is seen as vital to the future of Sligo, which has so far failed to develop retail facilities like other towns of similar size.
Felim O'Rourke, lecturer in economics at the institute of technology, says Sligo is "not functioning as a regional centre" as a result of its underdeveloped retail sector.
"Castlerea is the same distance from here as it is from Galway, but six times as many people living there would go to shop in Galway," he says.
On foot of the Wine Street masterplan in 2000, Treasury Holdings won the right to develop the borough council-owned site and was left to negotiate with adjoining property-owners, one of whom is stubbornly holding out. One of the priorities is to build a new Dunnes Stores to replace its present shack.
It is said locally, sotto voce, that Sligo is run by a small group of business people. Known as the "Seven Sisters", though they are all men, they meet for coffee every morning in the Adelaide, off Wine Street, to discuss matters of mutual concern with a view to protecting their business interests.
But local developers don't always get their way. Louis Doherty, a Sligo antiques dealer, was refused permission by the borough council and by An Bord Pleanála on appeal for a substantial scheme of apartments and shops which would have required the demolition of a two-storey building beside the Courthouse.
Alan Dunlop, the Glasgow-based architect who designed the scheme, said dealing with the Irish planning process was like "wading through treacle" after the borough council first voted not to list the 1820s building that was threatened and later voted the opposite way, but "on politics not on issues".
An Taisce welcomed the refusal of planning permission, saying the daring contemporary building proposed was "over-scaled and would have been seriously detrimental to the wonderfully restored courthouse". Its "huge urban scale" would have been inappropriate to its setting on Old Market Street, it said.
Sligo did not do well under the Government's decentralisation programme. Of the 10,500 public servants affected, it is slated to get just 100, compared to 265 for Carrick-on-Shannon, 230 for Donegal town and 140 for Knock Airport. "It's not a lot," Hubert Kearns concedes. "We were disappointed."
However, he believes many of those earmarked for the smaller towns will choose to live in Sligo and "reverse-commute" to their new workplaces. One of the major employers in the area, after Abbott Laboratories, is the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs, which has 500 staff in Sligo.
Kearns agrees that the dominance of Dublin represents a huge challenge and says that, if Sligo is to become a more attractive place for people to live, it needs Government support upfront, as well as private investment, to improve its infrastructure, shopping, leisure, sports and cultural facilities.
As the first county manager to reapply for a second seven-year term of office, he says he wanted to stay on because he gets "a thrill out of seeing things through. Sligo is a place I like, a place with a future. It's beginning to move, but it takes a long-term commitment to bring all the pieces together."
But Felim O'Rourke, a one-time associate of Ray MacSharry, Sligo's most successful politician, said there was "a vacuum of leadership, someone to articulate a vision and implement it. The major attraction of Galway is Galway itself. Sligo has that potential as a regional capital and tourism magnet."