Our New Year Resolutions.

Edinburgh Castle & our Hogmanay party.

In Scotland we do not celebrate the coming of the New Year we celebrate the passing of the Old Year. Our Hogmanay, which is also celebrated on the 31^st December, is quite probably a Norse and Gaelic fusion that originally celebrated the winter solstice.

Our modern version allows for a rather delightful custom of “first-footing” where, just after midnight, we would visit our neighbours, bringing them a lump of coal for their fire, whisky to warm them up and, depending on where you live, some food in the form of a type of rich fruit cake (or black bun) or even the gift of the odd pickled herring!

Auld Lang Syne lip syncing begins.

It is at this time of year, when the bells are struck at mid-night that we all stand on wobbly, booze soaked legs, we link our arms together in one big circle and sing one of Scotland’s most famous poems “Auld Lang Syne”, penned by none other than Robert Burns. This is one of those songs that we all know the chorus to but as for the other words and verses they are lost in a hail strum of slurred humming and pretend voice syncing that would do our modern day pop stars proud.

Like that other tradition, we Scots do however make the odd New Year resolution, mostly around having a healthier life style for the year ahead. We do go out of our way to make such commitments but the lure of one of our culinary contributions to world food, the deep fried mars bar, comes a calling after the Hogmanay hangover and usually within 24 hours the healthier resolution has been kicked into touch.

So what should we look for when we are considering Waterford’s New Year resolutions?

Culinary heart attack in a box!

I do hope that those with both power and influence for Waterford will have tangible 2016 New Year resolutions that will essentially deliver. For so many years we have missed out on investment whilst other neighbouring counties have benefited from so many New Year promises.

As the Government is currently awash with lots of extra tax revenue, and influencers are stuffing their own constituency ballot boxes with this extra cash, I would ask for €15 million to invest in UHW’s cardiology unit. This will allow the speedy completion of the unit and sufficient funding to run the service for the next 3, 4 or 5 years.

Another €20 million to finally deliver and create a University for Waterford and the South East with all the bells and whistles needed to attract significant research funding. Not a fudged pressure delivered hotchpotch multi-campus minestrone soup of an organisation, as is being proposed, but a REAL University based and administered in Waterford City that will clearly benefit the economic future of the entire South East.

A further €25 million to develop our North Quay, the railway station and the port to drive a whole new tourism market for Waterford and the South East. If we could develop these three vital pieces of the City’s infrastructure we could place Waterford City at the very heart of the Ireland’s Ancient East tourism project and make Waterford City the 3 or 4 night destination stop that would be the anchor for every tourist wishing to explore this Ancient East region.

Happy Hogmanay!

Only circa €60 million, and not a long term loan, would go a long way to redressing the lack of focused investment in Waterford and the South East. We are at the moment seeing our hospital, our docks/port and our third level education establishment being ever so slowly dismantled and systematically taken away from us. If we are not careful these essential pieces of infrastructure will soon disappear for good.

If we do not have strong political and public representation fighting for every Euro of the Government investment pie we will remain the City that always had concrete New Year resolutions that were never actually delivered.

We do not want to be eating deep fried Mars Bars early next year.

Happy Hogmanay!

The countdown is well and truly on!

A Countdown conundrum!

A little over one week to C-Day and joy of joys the City Centre, last weekend, had a steady flow of people alternating between the spine of the City, the Barronstrand Street, John Robert’s Square, Broad Street, Michael Street and Applemarket axis, and the Viking Triangle area, with a few popping up the hill to take in the winter offerings in and around Ballybricken.

I believe that the whole offering last Sunday was exceptional and after an unspeakable spell of very bad weather many people and many visitors took respite after storm Desmond, and committed to going out prior to the next storm Eva arriving, to come into the City Centre and sample Waterford at Christmas.

2015 is in fact my fifteenth Christmas in Waterford and over these last fifteen years I have witnessed the City grow in stature as a destination for Christmas shoppers. These much needed and very welcomed shoppers are the lifeblood of many of our businesses and the festive period is probably one of the few times of the year where a profit can actually be made.

Many of our businesses can be operating on margins as low as 5% and that means the tills need to ring at an ever faster pace in order to make enough margin to see businesses through the barren and lean months of January and February that follow the flurry of Christmas activity.

There was much on offer on Sunday 13^th December and one of the highlights had to be the Winter Wonderbands competition that saw the City of Waterford Brass lift the inaugural Waterford Business Group sponsored trophy.

Jubilant City of Waterford Brass.

The concept saw three of our City’s finest, the City of Waterford Brass, De La Salle Scouts Pipe Band and the Thomas Francis Meagher Fife and Drum Band, compete across three performance areas located in Broad Street, Applemarket and the Bishop’s Palace. The whole event was supported by WLR FM’s outside broadcast unit and a running update was given live on air throughout the afternoon.

At just after 3pm the winners were announced and after much whooping and hollering interviews with the judges and band members took place live on air. This event will return in 2016 with perhaps as many as ten competing bands and in 2017 the whole event has the potential to become a national event taking in both a Saturday and a Sunday.

Winter Wonderbands was part of a promoted “Shop Local Sunday” commitment and it gave those who ventured into the City Centre something a little bit extra special and it also gave three of our City bands the opportunity to showcase themselves to a whole new market audience.

The reaction to the competition was priceless. With mums, dads, kids, and grandparents all stopping to sing, tap their feet, dance and jump around with excitement as one after another our favourite Christmas tunes were energetically played by all the band members concerned. Whilst it is very difficult to solely judge three very different bands one of the criteria for judging was audience participation and all three bands made a monumental effort to get their audience involved.

Calvin's logic.

A very high bar has now been set as many visitors to the City thought that this type of activity was the norm for Waterford at Christmas. I have no doubt that many will have left Waterford last weekend wishing they lived here and after what was on offer who can blame them for thinking that way.

It often takes an “outsider’s eyes” to remind us just what we have to offer and so many visitors to Waterford see a wonderful compact medieval City that is both big enough and yet small enough to enjoy.

Our challenge will be to continue that offering far beyond C-Day and ensure our City grows and expends at a rapid pace. The solid foundations are there we just need to give a few people a gentile New Year kick in the ass to remind them what is needed. 

Waterford cannot just be for Christmas!

As we head inextricably towards Christmas Day it was great to see the City Centre so busy last weekend, despite the best efforts of storm Desmond. It has been quite clear for some time now that our traditional Waterford shopping days are now Thursday, Friday and Saturday and of course Sunday, probably being the busiest shopping day due to the unlimited FREE car parking we can all avail of.

It is great to see these increased footfall numbers that our City Centre retailers so badly need and of course the Winterval Festival and the Waterford Business Group’s “Shop Local Sunday”, the 13^th December, and the Winter Wonderbands competition, Sunday 13^th December, will all help to keep those footfall numbers UP!

What about after this Festive period?

Teresa Mannion taking on storm Desmond!

The fact is that Waterford businesses need to have continuous support to help keep these SME’s in business. To put it bluntly there has to be money coming across the counter in order for businesses to employ staff, pay commercial rates, pay insurance premiums, pay utility bills, pay vat, pay revenue etc. The cost of being in business is very high and enormously challenging and many of the businesses we love and support are in fact operating at tiny margins, some as low as 5%.

These tiny margins make it extraordinarily challenging to absorb any increased business costs and therefore the only way for many of these businesses to survive and grow is to see a reduction in business costs coupled with significant increases in footfall numbers across the City and County.

However, this message I fear is being loss on so many of those that represent us.

My journalistic colleagues and I do not for one moment class myself as one of our City’s journalist (truth is I just always wanted an excuse to say that phrase), have indicated to me that at the Councils recent “behind closed doors budget meetings” a cohort of Councillors had advocated an INCREASE in commercial rates and an INCREASE in City Centre car parking charges. Perhaps proof that these sources were correct was the fact that there was also a proposal to implement car parking charges in Dunmore East, which was subsequently defeated.

In the end what we ended up with, after I hope was some robust lobbying, was no rates and no car parking increases but a 20% commercial rates charge on empty shops and empty premises for 2016 and beyond.

The fact that such increases were even considered shows just how out of touch some of our Councillors are with the realities of being in business in the City and County. Perhaps these Councillors should identify themselves and explain to us their justification as to why they considered those aforementioned increases appropriate to the many businesses across the City and County.

I fear now that the new “empty building” commercial rates charge may in fact create a big hairy retail monster for the City Centre. If distressed property owners are in reality being forced to rent out their properties, you have to ask yourself just what type of retailer will fill such premises at what can only be very low rental prices.

Far from offering a carrot to getting premises let are we not in danger of filling our City and County with the very retailers that will drive footfall elsewhere, where there is better choice and a better retail mix?

To generate much needed increased footfall and the higher spend that will eventually attract new retailers to the City Centre, the very retailers that my daughter keeps harping on about, we need to create a holistic approach that gives out far more carrots and does less beating with a stick.

We are not there just yet and in order to get there we need more direct lobbying by the very people who understand the dynamics of being in business in Waterford.

Time to speak the truth even if your voice shakes.

Our chance to make a land grab!

"We can use these & fill them with the North Quay rubble."

My recent article, published in the Waterford Today, on the North Quay’s demolition has certainly sparked much debate around the lack of removal of the rubble and a number of people have been in touch stating that they were led to believe that the whole site would be left “clean and clear” once the demolition had taken place.

The potential for huge piles of rubble, which we could all be staring at for months on end, got me thinking about a creative way WE could help to shift said rubble as a cost neutral exercise for Council. That is assuming that the rubble will not be left in architecturally pleasing piles that we are told resemble the pyramids of Giza.

It is only a matter of time before we get the call to arms, which will be broadcast loud and clear on Deise AM, for the people of Waterford to get involved in helping shift the rubble as no extra money could be found in the Council’s 2016 budget to do this on our behalf.

I can just imagine thousands of people from Waterford marching across Rice Bridge and visiting the North Quays wearing overly baggy trousers and, rather strangely, being observed placing large quantities of the rubble into their trouser pockets. In a similar manner to Messer McQueen, Gardner, Pleasance and Attenborough in The Great Escape and of course Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption.

How long will it take to build a new wall?

Having secretly filled hidden jute sacks inside their baggy trouser legs the people of Waterford would head off in the direction of Ferrybank and the Port where they would deposit the rubble along Minister Coffey’s proposed new boundary line.

Over a period of months the North Quay would be rid of the rubble and a new city wall would have appeared, grabbing the very land that Kilkenny Councillors are incredulously protecting. An area that, until now, Kilkenny Council seem to have had no interest in until they heard the sound of commercial rates income coming from the expansion of the IDA site at the Port of Waterford.

Literally over night Waterford City would have expanded and we would suddenly, for once and for all, have incorporated Ferrybank and the Port of Waterford under the control of Waterford Council. There would be no need for any more committee discussions as the people of Waterford would have taken the bulls by the horns, bypassed all the political rhetoric and done what should have be done years ago.

The added bonus would be that our history of unconquerable walls is good, “Urbs Intacta Manet”, and once we secured the land grab it would be impossible for Kilkenny to take it back.

With such large quantities of stone and rubble needing to be moved we could also restart the old jute factory and for a short window of opportunity someone could create a wee cottage industry to supply the small jute sacks ideally sized to perfectly fit inside a trouser leg. Eventually the old jute factory could be turned into a real working museum along the lines of Verdant Mills in Dundee.

A hot topic on both sides of the River Suir.

The above is of course fantasy and the ramblings of an over active mind but the sentiment and meaning are real.

If Waterford City and County are to compete with our neighbouring counties and towns then we really need to look to the future with added aggression and ambition.

The North Quay must not become an eyesore for our citizens and the City’s 2016 visitors. It was hard enough to keep positive when the works on the South Quay were taking place and trying to constantly explain that “2011 Tall Ships are coming back” banner was beyond a joke!

Optics is everything. Incorporating Ferrybank and the Port into the City will make us a better place to invest in and, more significantly, we will be able to control our shop window to the City, which at the moment is controlled by Kilkenny Council. 

Now where is the sense in that!

Done and dusted.

As Winterval comes to the end of its first week we can look forward to a busy Christmas and hopefully the many businesses in and around the City Centre will see a much needed boost in sales that will carry them through into 2016. In 2016 all we can hope for as a Christmas present is a much bigger slice of the recovery cake and that all the headline promises we have read and heard about in our local media will be delivered by those making the promises.

Remember, it is very dangerous to over promise!

Waterford’s Four are now in election mode and are willing to promise delivery on projects that in truth should have been delivered months and years ago. No doubt over the next few weeks and months we will be endlessly bombarded with just how lucky we have been in terms of investment. So we really must ask ourselves if what has come our way is good enough or can be accepted as the absolute minimum that was needed to be delivered over the lifetime of the last Government. I would advocate that Government has under delivered for Waterford.

The simple fact is that more should have come Waterford’s way over the last number of years and we must all understand that any investment, that has managed to travel down the M9 from Dublin, has not been nearly enough and, yes, we may well sit at the top table but we are still feeding off the crumbs thrown to us and we have still not been invited to choose from the menu.

At the last Waterford Council plenary meeting, held in Dungarvan, the Council passed the Waterford City Centre Urban Renewal Scheme. A Scheme that will see circa €4,000,000 come from Government and circa €4,000,000 come from Waterford Council. Why ALL the money for the Scheme cannot come from Government I do not know!

The final meaty document contains all the plans, altered plans and reference to the 76 submissions from organisations, groups, individuals, businesses and Councillors – well 4 Councillors to be very precise.

Councillors Mulligan, Kelly, O’Neill and Daniels appear to be the only four Councillors out of our 32 good men and women of the Council, who seem to have been bothered to lodge a written submission. I will hazard a guess that many more will claim a significant input, behind closed doors, in committee, to this development document – but it would have been fitting for us, members of the public, to be able to actually read and dissect our Councillors input and observations, so that we can judge for ourselves the level of that input.

The final document is now done and dusted and all indications are that the work will start early in 2016 with the promise that no work on reducing car parking spaces will commence until the gas works car park is delivered – first muted for completion some 4 or 5 years ago!

During last week’s Metropolitan Council meeting we heard that the demolition for the North Quay was also done and dusted (again) and the work would start in the New Year. However, not many people will realise that we are to be left with piles of “concrete road foundation stones” of around 5cm square.

Swindon's Magic Roundabout

This substrate will be left on the North Quay until such times as it can be used.

The debacle that was the broadcast centre roundabout is now done and dusted. People power made all the difference and I have no doubt that this engineering master class has seen the Council receive the most amounts of complaints since records began.

It just goes to show that when we all work together mountains can be moved. Unfortunately, social media was almost instantaneously awash with Councillors claiming individual credit for what really should have been acknowledged as a remarkable team effort to turn around an experiment that a five year old Lego user could see would not work.

An attack on our Liberté.

I prepare to write this blog based on my experiences of the previous week and around events and meetings that I may have attended, which I feel the readers would be interested to read my commentary on. My blog is also a reflection of my weekly article in one of Waterford City's local newspapers. 

So, last week I was going to write and express my views on my attendance at the recent plenary session of Waterford Council, in Dungarvan, and, of course, the debacle that was the Broadcast Centre roundabout on the ring road, which on Friday afternoon was miraculously reduced to one lane at the apparent insistence of the National Roads Authority, as part of some “continental style” traffic management experiment.

However, as I watched the Bosnia and Herzegovina versus Ireland qualifier, on a foggy night in Zenica, social media started to light up and flash reports of gun attacks and bombings taking place across the whole of Paris.

As the news started to filter through it became very apparent that Paris was once again under attack and, for the second time in 2015, there was a Multi Pronged Terrorist Attack (MPTA) taking place across the capital city of France. No one could have imagined that only ten months on from the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket attacks that we would once again be revisiting all the horrors associated with a coordinated and heinous attack on the City, the nation and the people that live by the motto “Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité”.

By now there have been thousands of words written about last Friday’s MPTA and perhaps more worryingly for all of us is that this latest attack was not aimed at one organisation but unmistakably targeted a nation and its people. Worryingly, this latest attack targeted more than just the French nation as it also targeted Germany and the USA. The German football team were playing in the Stade de France and a US band was playing in the Bataclan Theatre, and if it was not for an observant security guard a suicide bomber would have accessed fans in the Stade de France!

We are now beginning to see a new type of terrorism that can coordinate and operate multiple near-simultaneous bombings and shootings and questions have to be asked if our Western security forces can cope with and prevent such coordinated attacks in the future. I fear that the determined terrorists we are now facing will always manage to evade security forces, as these can never be 100% secure, and inflict their own perverted style of justice on our Western world.

The future of free border access across Europe, which were created in 1985 with The Schengen Agreement, must now to be reviewed as evidence emerges on how the terrorists were able to travel freely crossing borders in cars weighed down with weapons, bombs and ammunition.

If we are to protect the very freedoms that allow us to write commentary in the printed media, post opposing observations on social media and permit us the opportunity air our own views, and argue these robustly in public, then we must be prepared to protect these fundamental rights.

Friday 13^th November will change Europe forever and, unlike the events in Paris of 7^th January, last Friday’s events will alter our views and our perception of just how safe our society is. As European nations begin to pick through the evidence that will eventually trace the origins of this monstrous attack, we must hope and trust that a global solution will now be found and implemented.

ISIS is a growing threat to the very way we lead our lives and we have to find a consistent solution that protects us in our own free society. We cannot allow terrorist organisations to dictate our liberty just because they fundamentally disagree with our way of living. We must jealously protect those freedoms and perhaps, just perhaps, we need drop our PC mumbo jumbo rhetoric and start some straight talking as how to best look after OUR hard fought societal freedoms.

It is Budget time once again!

The 2015/2016 national budget is now behind us and we are just awaiting some last minute discussions in the Dáil, some machinations in the Seanad, and then the final approval of the Finance Bill, traditionally, sometime in February and then it will be all over for another year and it could well be the last budget delivered by the FG/Labour coalition as we move inextricably towards the promised “E-A-R-L-Y” spring election. Before we know it, it will be 2016 and we will all have forgotten about Mr Noonan’s last budget.

However, for us in Waterford, there is another budget looming on the horizon – the Waterford City and County Council budget.

As the Council begin to mull over their financial figures and projections for 2016, we are once again nearer the time for our Council Executive and our Council Representatives to vote on the 2016 budget, which will be somewhere around the €132,000,000 mark! It is a time for us to see how our representatives perform in what is seen by many as their most fundamental task.

Will the proposed budget be passed? Will we see pact voting? Will we see strategic voting? Will we see a genuine forensics analysis of the budget figures?

This is the time of year when our public representatives earn their corn and it really is a time of year when we hope that they will look at the bigger picture, rather than a parochial view of their own wards, and make the right decisions that will drive economic investment back into the City Centre and further afield across the whole County. Failure to understand the economics of making sound budgetary decisions will have a profound effect on how we perform as a City and County in 2016.

This budget sets out the Council’s spending plans for 2016 and also sets income targets on big ticket items such as the Commercial Rates collection which in the last budget was circa €32,000,000, it sets the household charges, car parking charges and all the other associated cost centres that will allow the Council to operate for the next 12 months. We will also see spending plans outlined and discussed such as the delivery of the Waterford City Centre Urban Renewal Plans, festival spending budgets, roads maintenance plans, housing spending and much, much more besides.

The headline figures for businesses will, of course, be the Commercial Rates collection amounts and whether or not these will remain the same, increase or ideally, for businesses to invest, these should be reduced by up to 20%. A rates reduction will encourage investment, will increase employment and will make for a better City Centre.

Alas, I feel that these will remain the same as the last two years and yet the brave decision has to be the introduction of a significant reduction to help struggling City Centre businesses. Any offset in the reduction of rates will be collected with new businesses starting up and a significant rates reduction will go some way to encouraging the retail brands the City is currently missing to invest in Waterford. In addition a better retail mix will drive increased footfall and this in turn will also encourage more business start-ups and these new businesses will pay their share in commercial rates. Win Win!

Another brave decision would be the reduction in car parking charges and, if the Council take the lead in this process, then the private owners have to follow suits. This is still the elephant in the room and until we tackle this issue we will find it increasingly difficult to encourage the people on the “Dunmore Road” into the City Centre never mind further afield.

I still wonder if, due to their free car parking passes, our representatives see the car parking as an issue or perhaps they drive around wearing rose tinted glasses.

After all, if it costs you nothing, zero, nada, nil to park your car in Waterford City and County why would there be a problem?