"I think the people of Dublin should mind their own goddamn business and let us get on with ours."
With this comment on an intervention by An Taisce in the proposed demolition of a listed building, a councillor of Waterford Corporation recently showed the level of debate he was willing to engage in concerning proper planning in his city.
Good planning is vital to Waterford's undoubted aspiration to find a confident identity and create a graceful built environment which will enhance the attraction of the city for visitor and resident alike.
It has plainly been lacking in the past. The city's commercial streetscapes are a mishmash of the old and the new, the pastiche, the bizarre, the ugly and, frequently, the derelict and decaying. There is no consensus on planning priorities and aesthetics, and, to judge from some debates involving elected representatives, little hope of finding one.
Just 30 miles to the north, Kilkenny holds out a striking example of the opposite mentality. There, historic houses and traditional shop fronts have been carefully preserved and redecorated, giving that city a distinct and impressive identity which draws and holds many thousands of admiring visitors.
So far, Waterford has seemed unable to rise to the broad view and to learn from the mistakes and triumphs of other urban centres. Apart from a creditable corporation project to pedestrianise and preserve some of the oldest streets around Reginald's Tower, the evolution of the modern city appears to have been piecemeal and to have lacked a firm, integrated vision.
The most obvious example of this is in the area of the city's extensive, and potentially impressive, south quays. The corporation's decision to grant outline planning permission for a new bus station at one end of the quays is now under appeal to An Bord Pleanala.
If it is confirmed, it could scotch hopes for a unified and imaginative redevelopment of the entire quays as a recreational/amenity space.
The matter which caused the latest outburst against An Taisce, however, concerns a plan to demolish and redevelop just two premises at Broad Street.
It is in that section of the city which was laid out following the Norman invasion in 1170. The corporation decided on March 27th to grant permission for the joint retail/apartment development of these buildings, the only ones of any antiquity in Broad Street, which is in the heart of Norman Waterford.
An Taisce points out that the west side of Broad Street has been completely demolished "and replaced by buildings of unsurpassed ugliness." The heritage body believes that the present plan to demolish Flanagans fish shop and a neighbouring building will finally "denude and sterilise one of Waterford's most historic streets".
An Taisce said that the shop was important enough to be included on three separate preservation lists in the city's 1994 Development Plan. To lose it and its equally historic neighbour would undermine all the other listed properties in the city, the association claims.
The development plan, in fact, remarked that "given the relative scarcity of quality 18th-and 19th-century shop fronts surviving in the city, it is the policy of the Planning Authority to preserve and retain traditional shop, fronts of townscape importance.
An Taisce has outlined, in a submission to An Bord Pleanala, the architectural and interior decorative aspects of the two listed premises which it contends are of importance.
Oddly, the threat to these old commercial premises may have arisen as a result of the praiseworthy Government scheme to attract property owners to bring back into use vacant upper-floor space over shops. The aim was to enable more people to live over the shops in city centres.
But because of the limited response to this scheme, a further pilot scheme was introduced in 1994 which offered special tax incentives for development in a limited number of streets in five county boroughs.
However, councillors such as Fine Gael's Stephen Rogers, who made the comment quoted at the outset, see An Taisce's intervention simply as "interfering with the progress of the city."
He was supported at the same corporation meeting by Alderman Liam Curham (Labour), who called the An Taisce appeal "disgraceful", and said the body was becoming like a "vigilante lobby committee".
But the implication that the association is behind a flood of appeals to An Bord Pleanala was rebutted by An Taisce's honorary secretary, Mr Des Griffin. He said that in the past five years they had appealed only three planning decisions in the city and two in the county.
The depressing tone of the dispute appears to dispel any prospect that Waterford can approach its considerable urban renewal problems in an atmosphere of reasoned debate.