Cork Chamber Rise to PROC Challenge

20th Aug 2015

At the start of August we published an article in the Evening Echo calling on businesses and business organisations to come out and help us get Cork sparkling. You can see it here:

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Cork Chamber’s Danielle Healy was quickest off the mark to reply to us and, following a graffiti removal demo from PROC, within just a few days nine Cork Chamber staff took to the streets to help clean up these long lingering eyesores.

With building dereliction rampant through-out the recession lots of us have become oblivious or even accepting of the vast amounts of graffiti scrawled and sprayed on shop fronts all over town. A derelict or vacant building doesn’t have to look manky!
 

Cork Chamber staff removing graffiti on Carey's Lane last Friday afternoon

And it’s not just empty premises that fall victim to taggers. There are lots of active and busy shops in the city centre that are literally caked in tags – many for several years - but the business owners do nothing about them. They have no pride in their city.

Cork City Council are close to powerless to force private business owners and landlords to clean and paint their premises. Unless a building is about to fall into the street or in breach of planning there’s not a whole lot a local authority can do except to kindly ask a slumlord or disinterested tenant to have a bit of common decency and clean up their manky building.   

Unfortunately with so many apathetic merchant family legacies, sly penny-pinching operators and soulless decaying NAMA buildings those requests for decency largely fall on deaf ears or are returned with jaded rants about the price of a parking disc or the cost of doing business. This sad and short term thinking seems to be that if you’re not the worst then you’re grand.
 

It can take as little as 5 minutes to remove many of the tags that have been on buildings for over 5 years

A sense of a bigger picture and the effect of hard hitting negative reviews of the condition of the city on Tripadvisor and other hugely influential publications is lost on them. A pitiful and un-Cork attitude for anyone lucky enough to be from this great city and county. After the revolution - when PROC takes full control of Cork - these people will be tried for treason!

While local authority legal power is weak and watery there’s little success to be had from business organisations sending out press releases in the hope it guilt trips these ignorant ‘traitors’ into rolling up their sleeves - or at least hiring a painter or a power washer if they’re afraid of a bit of hard work.

Focussing on those who should be doing it isn’t working so let’s get out there and do it ourselves. That’s what Cork Chamber have done and we hope to see others join the effort.  

To join the push to make the city centre graffiti free please drop us a line:
editor@peoplesrepublicofcork.com