WITHOUT a big spinning top down the middle of O’Connell Street to focus on, it’s really hard not to miss the dirt and grimy stains on our new and improved city centre walkway.
Our main thoroughfare now looks like the dirtiest pair of underpants any mammy has ever had to handle. I am talking tidy whities turned inside out, back to front, and round again, until they eventually gave up the ghost and made their own way to the laundry basket.
‘Minging’ was the word used by one local councillor recently out in County Hall when the city centre came up for debate. All the elbow grease and hot washes in the world don’t look like they’re going to remove some of those stains.
Last week, under the cover of darkness and behind closed doors, like the members of a secret sect, council members and officials met to dance around a burning pyre and discuss plans for the maintenance and upkeep of O’Connell Street over jugs of mead.
No young virgins or farm animals were harmed during the private briefing, but chances are there will now have to be human sacrifices on an annual basis or the diggers will be back to spoil the crops in city vape stores and discount shops on every full moon.
But for now, it’s a case of nothing to see here, move along, and don’t be bothering us with your auld questions. I mean, it’s not as if €9.1 million came out of taxpayers’ coffers to send us back to the Dark Ages.
The works are almost finished, touch wood, and the only problem we have now – besides irate motorists on Patrick Street trying to mow down pedestrians after sitting in traffic for an age and vehicles following buses up the bus lane like a gaggle of silly law-breaking geese – is how to lose that retro €9.1 million ‘bring out your dead’ vibe that the powers that be have been cultivating.
Maybe the local authority’s new street cleaners should be kitted out in hemp tunics and wooden patens and sent off down O’Connell Street with wheelbarrows and bells to fit in with its rustic reinvention.
The Council could even get some of the city’s great thespians involved. They could prance around like show-ponies in a glue factory, waxing lyrical to all the lords and ladies, while generally adding to the feel-good Medieval vibes about the place like wandering minstrels of olde.
Who needs Marks & Spencer when we can have bawdiness and brawling?
Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe the Council have a cunning plan all along. Not as cunning as a “fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University”, but certainly within a hare’s breath of it.
But back to the exclusive meeting of the Council’s secret society. Metropolitan members were informed that a dedicated street cleaning team will be set up to keep O’Connell Street clean regularly and more bins will also be added to the street at key locations.
I am told there will be secret handshakes and delousing involved as well as an additional maintenance and cleansing budget of €300,000 for this year.
But sadly – and this is the one that seems to have most upset local councillors — the funding for a sculpture is no longer available so the Council are currently looking at other funding for public art on the street.
So there you have it, there will be no rotating prism for revellers to urinate on of a Saturday night and adorn in snack box cartons.
The injustice of it all.
But seeing as the Medieval peasant vibe is proving such a hit, maybe they would consider a giant funeral pyre, 50 foot wicker man, or even a gallows and really commit to the bit.
And to prove that O’Connell Street is the saga that just keeps on giving, the most shocking piece of information relayed back to this publication by councillors in attendance was still to come.
Anyone who has seen the city centre in recent weeks will know that it looks like the ghost of Limerick’s laneways back to haunt us. It isn’t pretty, but the Council does have a solution. Of course, they do.
Councillors were informed that if stains can’t be removed from any defective pavement slabs on O’Connell Street, they could potentially be replaced.
So more works then. The groundhog came out, saw his shadow, and that was that.
“We still do not know definitively what sections of the completed street have been deep-cleaned and sealed and the Council could not tell us whether stained sections have been sealed or what has and hasn’t been sealed,” Labour councillor Conor Sheehan told the Limerick Post.
Visionaries, the lot of them.
As Blackadder himself might have said — there hasn’t been a project run this badly since Olaf the hairy, King of all the Vikings, ordered 80,000 battle helmets with the horns on the inside.
