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No Outdoor Christmas Market in Dublin? What’s going on?

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
No Outdoor Christmas Market in Dublin? What’s going on?

I am VERY passionate about Christmas Markets and if you are a Dublin Event Guide Reader for a while, you probably know that already. I can absolutely not get it why Dublin is incapable of having a good Christmas Market and interestingly, it seems that Galway, Cork, Waterford and Belfast ARE able to have a market that people like and that reliably happens year after year.

This year, there will not be an outdoor Christmas Market at all in Dublin and that is frankly just not good enough for a City that is quite dependent on tourism. I wrote a long piece about the failed St. Stephen’s Green Market in 2014 and about the “I believe in Christmas” market in 2015, that decided the “I believe” part of the name should be trademarked and that called itself “Christmas Tree & Village” not Christmas Market here: www.joergsteegmueller.com/2015/12/08/ireland-and-christmas-markets-it-cant-be-that-difficult/

Both markets were designed by Event Management people, NOT by Christmas Market experts and both markets didn’t deliver. After just one year the “I believe” market is gone again with the result that in 2016, Dublin has NO Christmas Market. Yes, there are some weekend markets with a Christmas theme, but this is not what tourists are interested in and it really isn’t good enough for us living in Dublin either.

So why are they failing? Because the focus is wrong, the location is wrong, food and drink doesn’t get enough attention and they are every time run by the wrong entity/organisation.

1) Focus: The outdoor markets in Dublin have never focused on the visitors, they always seem to focus in maximising the money taken as fees from the traders. This means that there is no proper product selection, but you sometimes find the weirdest “non-Christmas Market-worthy” products at stalls.

2) Location: George’s Dock is a nice venue, but for a Christmas Market it is too far out. It has to be in easy walking distance from the City Centre so that people can drop in and out during their shopping and then finish the day with good food and drink at the market. Dublin has a problem because there is no place in the City Centre. But you need a square or plaza of some sort to build a Christmas village. A long row of stalls (like at St. Stephen’s Green) will NEVER create the atmosphere that is needed.
There are in my opinion two suitable locations already in the City Centre, but only one of them might get the ok from the responsible authorities. In future I see one other area that could be suitable, but it will take a few years until it is available.

3) Food and Drink: It is soooo important to have good food and at least Gluehwein at a Christmas Market. At St. Stephen’s Green, Dublintown screwed up by giving the contract to run 2 or three food outlets to ONE Catering Company. Boring delivery, no variation and no competition. The food and drink offering was totally underwhelming. At some of my favourite markets, I would say at least 50% of the stalls are food and drink stalls. Alcoholic Gluehwein, but also non-alcoholic Glueh”wein” are sold and the food variety is vast. Result: People stay there until late and have their dinner at the market and meet with their friends for an evening out.

4) Organisation in charge: In Dublin it seems that every time the task to run a market is completely handed over to an event management company and the real organiser is getting out of the way. The result is that it is run exactly as any other event, not as an experience or something somebody is passionate about. In all towns I know, the Christmas Market is run by the Town/City Council who have passionate employees working on it really hard. In Dublin, Dublin City Council couldn’t care less about a Christmas Market in Dublin and IF they did care, they would just get an event management company again and not be involved themselves. The passing of responsibility to people that don’t care about this event more than the next 25 that they have to manage has to stop. Dublin Tourism or the Events section in Dublin City Council should run it with the explicit intention to make it an amazing experience for the visitors AND to run it from now for at least 10 years EVERY year not primarily to make money, but because a capital of a European city is expected to have a good quality market in the pre-Christmas period.

There are a few other little bits that are mentioned in the post that I linked to above, but if these few points get the right attention, we could have a great Christmas Market for the long term future. Without giving attention to them, we will have one failure after the next, like we did for the last 5 or so years.

Did I mention that I am very passionate about Christmas Markets? Now you see! ;-)

P.S. I just found what must be one of the most delusional quote of the season, considering the poor show of Dublin: DublinTown CEO Richard Guiney said: “I can’t think of anywhere that does Christmas as well as Dublin.”

Dublin, Odd, Tourism, , ,

Angry journalist suggests tourists in Dublin should go home!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Angry journalist suggests tourists in Dublin should go home!

The Irish Independent published an article on Thursday 17 November, in which Ita O’Kelly, an angry and seemingly narrow-minded journalist suggests that Dublin is chocked by too many tourists and therefore the tourists should go home.

Oddly the whole article doesn’t contain one strong argument that supports her opinion. She claims that it is the fault of all the tourists that Dublin has way too many coffee shops and totally ignores that the many coffee shops have queues out the door every single day of employees on their lunch breaks (tourists don’t wear suits!). Then she has an issue with “falling over” people reading maps when she just wants to go from A to B. Somehow she also blames tourists for the fact that a “vast number of people are begging on the streets”. But there is absolutely no correlation between these two and no evidence is provided how tourists (who in most cases are a lot less “generous” than Irish people when it comes to beggars) have put these beggars in the street. Street “entertainer” (the “” are put in by her) are allegedly also only there for the tourists and the nonsensical (and factually incorrect) sentence “When the city hosts free music events for its citizens, it’s virtually impossible to get a seat as the tickets have been snagged by the tourists.” just crowns a rubbish article. (Most free music events that “the city hosts” are not ticketed and are certainly not intended exclusively for its citizens. And if tickets have to be pre-booked or if they are available at the venue, tourists would never get priority over non-tourists.

Ita O’Kelly, who also seems to be angry about the impertinence of people preferring gluten-free food even if the have no medical condition, wants her Dublin back with no ice-cream parlours, no coffee shops and with a few billion Euro less per year (the money made from tourists in whole Ireland is 7bn per year). She doesn’t say “Make Dublin great again!”, but her thinking seems to be as open minded as Trump’s who wants to “Make America great again”

The oddest part about this rubbish is that the Irish Independent published it and most likely even paid for it!

Dublin is a cool place and visitors as well as inhabitants from all over the world are very very welcome!

Dublin, Irish, Odd, Society, Tourism, ,

Odd behaviour of Ryanair passengers? Are they all beginners?

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Odd behaviour of Ryanair passengers? Are they all beginners?

I haven’t used Ryanair for a while. Not because I have a problem with the company, but because they decided to stop flying to where I would like to go in Germany, so I had to go back using Aer Lingus. But this week I flew to Italy and Rome Ciampino was the most suitable airport to fly to. Ryanair flies there and the prices were ok, so we were in business.

Last time I flew with Ryanair they didn’t have any seat allocation yet, but it was a first come, first served approach when you get into the plane. That has changed now and you get seats allocated or (for a surcharge) can select them yourself. The consequence of this is that EVERY single person entering that plane knows exactly that there is a seat waiting for them and they know exactly where this seat is.

So can anybody explain the scenario in this picture to me? Why do approximately 150 people jump up from their seat as if someone has put needles under their backside as soon as boarding of this plane is even hinted?

Everybody has a seat assigned, so what do you gain by standing there for 10 minutes before the hinted boarding actually starts? Why do people still jump up as if it was a first come, first served seat allocation?

Is it just the space for the hand luggage that gets them to be mad impatient? We got on board as one of the last ones and there was still space for hand luggage.

Human beings are the most irrational species it seems! ;-)

Dublin, Odd, Society, Tourism,

Filthy Ireland – Incompetent Local Authorities & Useless Governments!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Filthy Ireland – Incompetent Local Authorities & Useless Governments!

A week ago, the free local newspaper Dublin People ran a story about the “Plan to end discharge of sewage off Rush coast is progressing” and to say that I was shocked when I read that headline would be a big understatement, I was speechless, appalled and outraged!! And I STILL can’t believe that in 2016 the filthy practice of dumping untreated sewage in the sea continues and will still continue for at least another two years!!

I know that Ireland dirtied our environment that way MUCH longer than it should have, but I thought that during the good years when money was nearly abundant, the filthy practice of sewage dumping had been stopped and that all communities had been equipped with sewage treatment plans. And now I realise that this is probably MUCH worse than this article indicates. If Rush, a village so close to the capital of a European country is such a dirt bag in 2016, then there will probably be MANY more remote places that do the same.

I grew up in a smallish village (half the size of Rush!) in Germany and I remember visiting the local sewage treatment plan when I was in Primary School and that is a long long time away!! And that time that local sewage treatment plan wasn’t new or recent by any means but had been there for many years. Yes, I also know that at that time and still for many years after Ireland was shockingly poor and would have never reached today’s infrastructural level without a huge amount of subsidies from the EU. So everything took a good bit longer, but for god’s sake, this is 2016 and we are still pumping our shite (literally!!) in the sea!?!

What incompetent local or national government has screwed up so much that it took such a long time to make these first steps! And it will take another two years before anything changes!

Useless and incompetent politicians and local authorities!!!

Dublin, Environment, Odd, Politics, , , ,

Censorship or not? Maser Art and Dublin City

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Censorship or not? Maser Art and Dublin City

Dublin is never boring and Dublin City regularly gets into hot water and often enough screws up big time. Something emerged again last week that had “Big Screw-up” written all over it, but is it that?

The Background: Street Artist Maser painted a big mural on the wall of the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar about 4 weeks ago. It was a read heart that had “Repeal the 8th” written in it. To understand that fully, you need to know that it refers to the 8th amendment, which was added to the Irish constitution in 1983 and which says “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”

Supporters see it as a clause protecting life, but the flip side is that it makes abortion illegal by constitution. Now, abortion was always illegal based on Irish laws and that amendment wouldn’t have been needed, but the anti-abortion campaigners were worried back then that the other laws wouldn’t be strong enough. At the time 67% of the voters in a referendum were in favour of this amendment.

Many people’s views about abortion have changed, however in the last 33 years and these changed views do support the availability of abortion in Ireland either in a restricted number of situations/scenarios or in every situation. And since the Irish laws haven’t prevented abortions, but made it extremely difficult and emotionally stressful for women in Ireland to get an abortion by travelling to other countries, these laws are useless anyway.

Since 1981, the “Repeal the 8th” campaign has grown and become stronger and the website “The HunReal Issues”, which promotes women’s issues, has commissioned street artist Maser to create this mural in Temple Bar.

Dublin City received 50 complaints and then told the Project Arts Centre that they will have to remove the mural because it is against planning legislation. But it seems that legal situation is not crystal clear.

The Journal.ie writes “A spokesperson for Dublin City Council said that class 12 of schedule two in part one of the Planning and Development Regulations 2001 “exempts the painting of the external part of any building or other structure from requiring planning permission”.” So that means you do NOT have to ask for permission to paint the external part of a building, right? But then the Dublin City folks continued saying “Murals and other artistic designs require planning permission when applied to the external part of any structure.” I might be missing something here and maybe the key is in “painting” vs “mural”, but JUST with that information I can’t see how the law was broken.

What got me at first was that the Project Arts Centre said that they never experienced any planning legislation issues despite the fact that they regularly have murals on the side of the building. If a abortion related mural was treated differently by Dublin City than other murals, that would certainly not be ok.

But then I tried to “test” a few other angles:

What if Dublin City didn’t get any complaints for previous paintings? If they don’t get active UNLESS they get complaints, then the current situation is not censorship. – What if previous murals didn’t contain a political (or commercial) message but were just pieces of art? Then it would be more about an “ad” vs a pretty picture. – And how would I feel if someone put a big promotion on a building of an idea I was opposed to? Anti-abortion murals on house walls maybe? How tolerant would we then be?

And taking all this into consideration, I can see why this specific mural is different than someone painting a pretty flower pot on the side of a building.

The mural is the expression of a free opinion and the expression of opinions has to be protected by our laws, but there are MANY ways to express an opinion and not every way has to be allowed. So, I would have a serious problem if it was made illegal to express “Repeal the 8th”, but I don’t think if one path of expression was declared as not permitted.

And, to be honest, it couldn’t have come better for the Repeal the 8th campaign: Many people (including myself) hadn’t heard anything about this mural before Dublin City stepped in. Best PR ever! ;-)

Dublin, Dublin City Council, Politics, Society, , , ,
 
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