Madam, – Your feature (“Life for the boom’s dead spaces”, June 30th) points us in a promising direction and it’s encouraging to see the newspaper used as a place to figure our way out of the post-boom quagmire.
I think architect Dominic Stevens cuts to the chase when he says that the fate of the empty housing estates (bank-owned, hence Government-owned, many of them) must be placed in the hands of the local communities where they sprang up, whether they were wanted or not.
A crucial next step is to bring people from local authorities, community groups and government bodies into this conversation so that we can re-imagine the political processes and bureaucratic/ legal procedures needed to enact real change.
Of course it is an enormous task, but we have to tackle it instead of waiting to see if the “current climate” will shift.
Here in north Roscommon, where we have hundreds of stagnating houses and there are all kinds of possibilities for transforming them into more vibrant mixed-use commercial and domestic zones or assisted living facilities for the elderly among us.
But we need to give our local community bodies more of a voice and, more importantly, the power to enact the changes they deem best for their own localities.
Can The Irish Times have a hand in getting this national discussion really going? Meantime, it is the woodlice and spiders who are setting up house in all those primrose-yellow, semi-detached houses. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – The creative contributions of the architects and artists reawakened my misgivings about the composition of the Government’s innovation taskforce.
There is no doubt that the entrepreneurs, technicians, scientists, academics and civil servants have talents that merit their inclusion.
But where are the writers, poets, designers, artists, musicians and philosophers?
The ability of our artists to inspire and capture the imagination of the world is well known.
Surely the melding of their attributes with the technical and scientific is the creative leap we need to make if we are to go beyond being surrogate mothers of invention to being natural fathers of true innovation .
Such a collaboration seems to me to be much more likely to give us not only a clever economy but a society of added values that could even light the way for both Berlin and Boston to follow. – Yours, etc,