A Mayo plea: The Mall is perfect, so leave it as it is
Dr. Richard Martin
I was aimlessly scrolling through Facebook recently and I came across a post on The Connaught Telegraph website under the headline ‘Future vision for the heart of Mayo town open to public feedback’.
It was an article about a proposed ‘major rejuvenation’ of the Mall, Castlebar, supported by funding from the Urban Regeneration and Development Fund (UDRF).
I clicked into it and read it. And my blood began to boil.
Attached to the article were two links.
The first was titled 'The Mall Master Plan Public Consultation' and the second was 'Future of the Mall – Public Consultation Online Questionnaire'.
As in all stories, it’s always best to start at the start.
What is the UDRF funding and where did it come from?
In early March of 2021, it was announced to much fanfare that the town of Castlebar was to receive €11.03 million for two main projects – the Castlebar Historic Core Reactivation Project (€8.53 million) and the Castlebar Military Barracks Project (€2.5 million).
I wrote a lengthy letter to The Connaught Telegraph in July of 2023, explaining how the funding worked.
At the time, I rang the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and spoke with a very amiable civil servant who courteously spent 30 minutes on the phone with me. The key take home message was that the funding was fluid. A total of €11.03 million had been allocated and that was a de facto situation.
However, how the money was spent was totally at the discretion of the local authority.
So this is a crucial point.
There is not an allocated fixed sum of money that has to be spent on the 'enhancement' or 'restoration' of the Mall.
Any attempt to suggest otherwise is false.
In effect, nothing needs to happen, nor should it.
I clicked into both links. I filled out the 'Future of the Mall – Public Consultation Online Questionnaire'. My answers to all the questions were curt, blunt and straightforward – ‘The Mall is perfect. Please leave it alone.’
I clicked into the other link - 'The Mall Master Plan Public Consultation'.
Reading it resulted in a sharp increase in my blood pressure. I had to take several deep breaths to calm down.
It is a report that Mayo County Council commissioned from Taylor McCarney Architects.
A sample of what it contains is as follows:
1. “The Green has become somewhat detached from the town, in both location and functional amenity perspective.”
I disagree. I use it every day along with hundreds of others in the town.
2. “The Green and the Mall no longer serve their original status and are now unanchored from the rest of the town, in particular from the commercial centre.”
The commerce of the town has moved from the Main Street to the periphery of the traditional urban centre at Hopkins Road for a multitude of reasons. One of them being the wholesale dereliction that exists from the top of Ellison Street all the way down Main Street.
That has been allowed to happen on Mayo County Council’s watch. The appalling wholesale dereliction on Ellison Street, which is roughly 200 metres from the council buildings on the Mall, is still unresolved.
There has made no meaningful effort to resolve the blight of dereliction around the Mall and town centre.
I think Mayo County Council should focus on the buildings which have fallen into rack and ruin as opposed to wilfully destroying our crown jewel.
Solve the dereliction and you solve the problem.
3. “The Mall and Green requires a shift in thinking to re-establish its purpose and reintegrate it into the urban fabric to offer the town a vibrant multi-purpose accessible public urban space.”
What does that mean?
4. “The intention is to strike a perfect balance between green biodiversity areas and an urban surface that will be robust enough to cater for additional community purposes and provide a heart to Castlebar’s urban regeneration project.”
Does every green space now have to become ‘biodiverse’? Surely, we can leave this one green space the way it is. Letting a patch of the green ‘grow wild’ is just virtue signalling fluff.
5. “Provide a new accessible urban square adjacent to the Methodist Church and Imperial Hotel to activate this space and encourage its use as a public communal active space.”
What does that mean? Convert the two green grass quadrants nearest the Mall into a paved area with shelter? Clearly that’s a terrible idea. It makes me shudder.
6. One of the aims of the report is the following: “Restore this public space to return it to its former significance within Castlebar and provide an urban heart for the town.”
The Mall and green is the heart of the town. It always has been and always will.
The Mayo Sligo Leitrim Education and Training Board (MSLETB) have agreed to buy a significant section of the Military Barracks site. Some 1.911 hectares of land. A 6,000 square-metre state-of-the art college, with a capacity for 1,000 students, will be built on the site.
The remainder of the site (.5 hectares) is still in council hands - this includes Blocks A, B, C and D, the Bridge House, and the entrance gates on the Rock Square and Lower Charles Street ends.
Surely the council can build an ‘urban surface’ within the military barracks complex which can cater ‘as a public communal active space’.
We don’t need to cover the entire town in paving and tarmacadam.
It was interesting reading the Facebook comments underneath the article. The verdict was unanimous. The people of the town don’t want to see the Mall touched.
One comment described it as ‘our past, present and future’.
There were a few people looking for a bandstand, which is not mentioned in the report. But where does it go?
The Mall is divided into four green quadrants by two intersecting footpaths. It will have to be positioned in one of the four quadrants.
Do we put it in the large quadrant near the county council offices?
If we do, it will mean more footpaths will have to be constructed for access and health and safety reasons. More tarmac.
If it’s inserted in any of the other quadrants, it has the potential to be an eyesore. And again more footpaths and tarmac – destroying the beautiful, untouched green space.
Isn’t there a beautiful amphitheatre at the lake for rehearsals on a beautiful summer’s evening? Why isn’t that being used?
The only way it could conceivably work is if the Ernie O’Malley statue was moved elsewhere and a bandstand was placed in the centre of the Mall. I’m still not crazy about that idea, however.
When I first went to college in Galway in 2005, Eyre Square was a construction site. The beautiful Georgian square was bulldozed and fenced off. It took an eternity to finish.
It’s a disaster. A massive footpath connecting one corner of the square to the other.
Sometimes the hardest thing in life is do nothing. Leave well alone. Don’t tamper. Don’t meddle. Just leave well alone.
The beautiful railing which surrounded Eyre Square now surrounds St. Nicholas’s Church.
The moral of the Eyre Square story is - don’t tamper or meddle with it.
We don’t have the right to do that to the Mall. The only right we have is to protect it for future generations. If you tamper or meddle with it, it’s lost forever.
We only have to look at the convent site. I walked around it one summer’s evening a few years back, and all that remains is a few terracotta tiles.
Once it’s gone, it can’t come back. Out of the blue and into the black. It was a keystone flagship building in the town.
All the history associated with it was obliterated in one fell swoop. It’s destruction was wrong on so many levels.
I remember going to Mass there on Sunday mornings as a child.
Something positive has to happen with that site. It’s a scandal that it has been left in that condition for so long. An attempt to convert it into a purposeful modern space was made last year. It failed.
In August of last year it was reported in this paper that a local business consortium was withdrawing a proposal to build a 98-bed nursing home, 49 sheltered apartments and a mix of retail and office space on the old convent site. In the end, they withdrew their application because they felt stymied by the planning system.
In a letter to the elected councillors, the consortium stated: “We are very frustrated, why did we even bother. We have tried to do something good for the town and develop something complimentary to the social services centre.
"I think we are better directing our resources to other projects outside of Mayo, we don’t believe there is any future dealing with them.”
So in effect, Mayo County Council are prepared to spend a lot of money on the Mall which it does not need.
It is our sacred green place in the psyche of generations of Castlebar people.
The proposed convent project would’ve created jobs and boosted our local economy. Also, remember we are in the midst of an existential housing and rental crisis.
Every cent of the €11.03 million UDRF funding should be spent on the Imperial Hotel and the Military Barracks.
If the Imperial Hotel is renovated and repurposed into a modern functional building everything will change.
The Imperial Hotel is the keystone building of the Mall and the town at large.
The beautiful untouched green space in front of it doesn’t need any ‘modern’ intervention.
Why don’t the council bring out a ‘Future of the Imperial – Public Consultation Online Questionnaire’ and ask the people of the town and county want they want from this building.
That’s where the focus should be.
And they would soon understand the mood of the people.
Hopefully common sense will prevail.