MAYOR John ‘Baywatch‘ Moran is determined to turn Limerick City into the Costa del C’mere I Want You.
Sure look, if at first you don’t succeed, try again and build majestic sandcastles on someone else’s front porch. This time round, it’s Steamboat Quay’s turn to have an “urban beach experience”.
Limerick’s answer to ‘The Hoff’ has not been resting on his laurels since the last sandstorm swept across O’Connell Avenue and got councillors’ parasols in a flap. He’s been plotting his Lawrence of Arabia-like return to the dunes of the Dock Road.
The executive Mayor, who once promised to solve Limerick’s housing crisis, is now keen to show us his vision for what the city can become. Beach canopies for all! Personally, I think he’s trying to solve the housing crisis one sandcastle at a time.
He’s coming off a bit like the mayor in Jaws for all his talk of transformations and experiencing a ‘different Limerick’.
‘Amity is a summer town, we need summer dollars.’
In fairness to his lordship, he is not the only one down in the local authority getting all worked up over waterfront development. The contingent out in Adare-Rathkeale district were drowning in their tea and scones at their monthly banjo duel when talk turned to Kilteery Pier in Loghill.
With more huff and puff than a city centre seaside tsunami, Fine Gael councillor Adam Teskey was digging deep into his county rhetoric, bulling like a great white in a paddling pool that the Council were looking at spending an estimated half a million euros on Kilteery Pier without the inclusion of all the bells and whistles.
Don’t mind your common gardener changing rooms and lifeguard facilities, Captain Teskey and his rowdy band of buccaneers wanted CCTV cameras, self-cleaning toilets, time-controlled electronic barriers, Perrier on tap, and rubber duckies for all the local electorate.
“Half a million for putting up a structure that doesn’t have a proper toilet facility, doesn’t have running water put into it, doesn’t have electricity. This is absolute madness,” Teskey bellowed.
His first mate, Cllr Stephen Keary, was also keen to keep a certain element out of their new marine kingdom, claiming: “You can’t be letting any kind of a jackass in there that can pull in a caravan. It needs to be properly controlled because we had issues there before with certain members of the community being parked up there for a number of weeks.”
Oh well, as a wise old man of the ocean deep once said, ‘this is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a fish!’
– Local Democracy Reporting Scheme