Poor Smiffy....

It gets such a bad rap!

There is an article in the Irish Times today about plans to save Smithfield.square. I hope it works. Smithfield has an interesting history and none of it is showcased. I've talked a bit about it in the past. It is a bummer walking through the square and seeing all the empty retail spaces. I mean, they just closed Subway for goodness sake!

The plans they had for 2007 were certainly grandiose! I'm not sure how the residents of the apartment buildings would have appreciated rock concerts being performed on their doorsteps! And the horse fair, well, I'm not a fan. (I wrote about it on my old blog, which I just discovered no longer exists). Sorry I can't link to the post, but believe me, I love tradition and all that, but the horse fair is not nice. I walked away from it in tears due to the way the horses were being treated. The local grocery shop closes the back half of their shop down on that day because so much stuff was getting nicked. The state of the square after a fair is disgusting.

All that being said, there are some nice things about the square. The Lighthouse Cinema is ace! The Jameson Distillery! The Cobblestone pub! And all of this underground art stuff that's so underground I've never heard of it! Smithfield is close to the National Museum, great restaurants in Stoneybatter, and is a nice stroll from, my favorite, the Phoenix Park. There's a LUAS stop here and there are decent bus close by. Sure there are knackers here, but that's a Dublin problem, not exclusively a Smithfield problem.

Out of the whole article, I think the truest statement is this: "When rents comes down, and we get rid of upward-only rent reviews, we’ll begin to see a lot of progress." High rents have been the demise of all the good things in Dublin. I guess landlords here would rather have empty space, then give breaks on the rent.

Huh.