Sometimes, you’d have to wonder what Dublin City Council – and many like them around the country – have got against our heritage, our communities and common feckin’ sense.
Dublin’s council is looking for a private operator to take over the Smithfield Fruit & Veg market and turn into yet another Dublin Disneyland for tourists.
In place of a gorgeous, if sadly neglected Victorian indoor market with old family run food businesses, they want to create a “tourist attraction” and “retail food space”.
It’s a screamingly bad decision, to trash more than a century of tradition and heritage and replace it with souless pop-up stalls and “artisan cupcake” bollix.
And all to cater for the only people who seem to matter in Dublin – the tourists.
“It will become a tourist attraction in its own right demonstrating traditional Irish food skills and production methods,” says the council.
In other words – they’ll hand a publicly owned city centre food market steeped in tradition and true Dublin character over to a private operator who will then spend millions to fake-up the traditional food market they killed.
It’ll be high rents for stalls selling traditional Dublin foods like burritos, doughnuts and noodles, with low-paid staff who won’t have a lot of inner-city Dubs amongst their ranks.
I spent around a decade living in and around Smithfield – and could never figure out why the Fruit & Veg market, and the lovely old Iveagh Market (now a wreck) were not regarded as jewells of the city.
Even as the Tiger roared, these were left to decline and fall into delapidation. In any other city in Europe, they would be regarded as fantastic amenities for locals and visitors alike.
For the love of God, all the Dublin city councillors had to do was take the train to Cork to see the famous English Market, a celebrated city centre food market that is now thriving with a mix of the old and the new, locally owned sushi stalls next to the butchers, bakers and fish-mongers on their third or fourth generation.
If you’ve been to Madrid, Lisbon or Barcelona – or London – you’ve seen how how these old markets have been cherished and allowed to bloom again.
They are places for local communities to shop, work and prosper. And sure, also fun for the tourists. But the attraction is that they are not faked-up.
Dublin City Council needs to realise this – and stop knocking the soul out of a great city.
