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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, , , ,

Busking under threat! City Councillors are determined to make Dublin boring

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Busking under threat! City Councillors are determined to make Dublin boring

For a number of years, the Dublin City Councillors are trying to re-organise the busking in the city and they are making a mess of it.

The problem is that the shops in the areas where busking makes sense don’t like buskers. They make noise and block the street, Busking at night also disturbs people’s sleep (more in Temple Bar than in Grafton Street where nobody lives). And then there are some really really bad buskers who shouldn’t be on the street at all.

So, it is totally accepted that a bit of structure needs to be injected. But the Councillors went over the top. They introduced the requirement for buskers to have a license that they need to buy from Dublin City and they defined the amount of noise buskers are allowed to make (but that is difficult to measure) and they created busking free zones and defined how far buskers should be from each other and for how long they are allowed to sing and how often they are allowed to repeat their songs. They even considered introducing the requirement of auditions for buskers!!! Mad!!

There was a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel! The previous busking laws were time limited to be reviewed some while later. This some while later has come now and with a LOT of delays finally the councillors discussed busking again and…made things worse again.

Because the noise measurement doesn’t work, now they have forbidden the use of backing tracks!!

Not too long ago, I saw a busker who played something like a pan flute. He wasn’t one of the Mexican flute player that can be found all over the world who mainly sell their CDs, but it was a guy whose hand was severely disabled. He could hold the pan flute but wouldn’t have been able to play any other instrument. With the new rules, he is out! Because pan flute without any backing track just doesn’t work.

A few years ago I heard two guys in Grafton Street who were amazing. They were the type of power or pop violinists that you see sometimes. Extremely talented, playing the violin like gods but they couldn’t do their gig without an orchestra. Obviously they didn’t bring their orchestra but had a backing track. You won’t see anything like that in Dublin anymore! …thanks to our City Councillors!

But it gets worse! Some of them even want to forbid the use of amplifiers. I am totally ok with a limitation of the amplifier use. Otherwise we will have huge PAs at some stage in Grafton Street and Temple Bar, but there are small 5-15W amps that help a bass player (for example) just to be heard without having to buy a new instrument. They don’t really make noise, they just allow the use of a normally amplified instrument in a more acoustic environment.

Dublin has a great musical tradition and a huge musical talent in our midst, but we (at least _I_) also like hearing “travelling musicians” and there HAS to be a way to use soft and careful limitations to improve the situation for ALL sides instead of forbidding everything!! City Councillors are meant to improve things in our City not destroy culture and variety.

Dublin, Dublin City Council, Events, Tourism, ,

College Green Plans – Consultation

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
College Green Plans – Consultation

The plans for College Green have been revealed. The intention is to pedestrianise the whole College Green area from Starbucks in Dame Street to the Westin Hotel in Westmoreland Street and up to Grafton Street. Suffolk Street is also becoming a car free zone. This is a HUGE area in the middle of the city and that has some pros and some cons.

The plus sides are that for the first time, Dublin will get a major civic space in the middle of the city centre and I really hope that that will be the new site for a completely new Christmas Market for Dublin and will also give opportunity to have other markets and events in that area.

But there are downsides for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists. The downside for motorists is clear, but the new issues for pedestrians and cyclists might need a bit more of an explanation. Usually cyclists are banned from pedestrianised areas and while there are short cycling lanes reaching into the main pedestrianised area, it most likely will still mean that you have to get off your bike and push it for some distance before you are allowed to continue your trip and since this is one of the main North-South routes, that doesn’t seem to be a good options. Complete cycling paths that allow to traverse the entire pedestrianised zone should be provided.

For pedestrians such cycling paths are a problem because it de-pedestrianises the zone BUT much worse is that busses, the LUAS and possibly even Taxis (completely unacceptable!) are still allowed to drive throughout the so-called “pedestrianised” zone. Either all or nothing is my opinion and wile we can’t divert the LUAS, busses and definitely taxis should NOT be allowed to drive through in my opinion.

Can you imagine the line of hundreds of taxis that will try to drive through that area in the hope to pick up passengers? And they are prepared to stop at any point at any time, ignorant to busses and the LUAS trying to get through.

If you have different opinions or even share my opinions, you are asked to submit your view on the proposed solution.

You have until 24 May and all details are here: www.dublincity.ie/college-green

Dublin, Dublin City Council, Traffic

Clamping in Dublin has gone down! Good thing, isn’t it? Or maybe not?

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Clamping in Dublin has gone down! Good thing, isn’t it? Or maybe not?

The newspapers reported this month that the clamping fees dropped to EUR 4.24 mio and is at a lowest level in 5 years. Since the initial idea behind clamping was to stop people from parking in the wrong place or for too long, then there should be a celebration about the drop. Instead, though, a parking fine appeals officer makes the suggestion to increase the penalty from EUR 80 to EUR 130 because it hasn’t been increased since 1998.

For any normal person, a penalty of EUR 80 hurts!! And it definitely hurts enough to comply with the law as much as possible. I would be VERY surprised if a fee of EUR 130 would increase the compliance with parking rules. Sure, EUR 130 hurts even more than EUR 80, but most of us really do not have so much money that we just happily give it to the clampers. I would say that in 95% of the cases the clamping happens because someone got delayed unintentionally or parked in a place where they read the signs wrong (clear way from 16:00 and you didn’t see that it will at some stage become a clearway).

The tiny amount of people that couldn’t be bothered complying with the rules and just accumulates parking tickets will most likely not change their behaviour either if the fees were increased.The appeals officer mentions a case where one offender was clamped 64 times in 48 months. 64×80 is the significant amount of EUR 5,120 and if that offender doesn’t care about paying EUR 5000, should we really thing that an increased fee to EUR 8,320 will make that offender suddenly pay for his parking? Not a chance.

I got clamped approximately 3 times in my life and I can say that it hurts a LOT to have to pay EUR 80. In two of the three cases I made a genuine mistake, the third case was a little more complicated. But I certainly never intended to or willingly risked to get clamped, so EUR 80 is more than enough!

The Irish Independent wrote about it here, and the Irish Times here.

Dublin, Dublin City Council, Odd, Traffic

College Green and the traffic

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
College Green and the traffic

Whoever thinks that Dublin City a) has a clue what they are doing regarding traffic measures or b) thinks they are doing a good job, really needs to wake up!

The public transport in our beloved Dublin is horrendously poor and the prices are much too high. The attempts to ban cars from the city are in principal not a bad idea, but because it all happens totally disjointed while ignoring some of Dublin’s geographical particularities and without improving the poor Public Transport, things are not looking good. The LUAS improved things a little, but plan to build two isolated lines should have appeared odd many many years ago. Now the cross-city LUAS is being added and it just points out the incapabilities of the people running the city.

Last week then, the current Dublin City “Manager” Owen Keegan, who was the Director of Traffic (!!) for many years in Dublin, said that he has no clue what to do with the buses that used the route along College Green once the LUAS tracks are installed. Dublin Bus wants to use the route again (that’s where the passengers are), Dublin City Management wants to ban all cars from College Green and if you ban cars, then I think ALL traffic (including buses and taxis) should be banned from an area. Either pedestrianise it or not!! Imagine they had allowed taxis and buses to continue driving in Grafton Street and Henry Street when they pedestrianised these streets!?

And you wonder what will happen to the buses on College Green? Who knows! If the Dublin City Manager and former Director of Traffic has no clue, things are looking bad!

www.newstalk.com/Some-bus-routes-may-be-banned-from-Dublins-College-Green-due-to-new-Luas-line

Dublin, Dublin City Council, Traffic, , ,
 
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