Dick Hogan, Southern Correspondent, pinpoints the strengths and weaknesses of the report on Cork's future
Laudable as it is, the Imagine Our Future report, published yesterday, which plots the future of Cork for the next decade, lacks two key elements - a proper funding structure and an interim reporting mechanism to inform the people Cork if targets are being met and, if not, why not.
After two years of consultation involving all the key statutory and voluntary agencies in Cork, the Cork City Development Board has produced a report which is aspirational, but nonetheless valuable for that.
If the 119 objectives in the report were met, then by 2012 Cork would be a city with a free-flowing bus service, a city free of crime at night and a city in which the arts were put on a pedestal.
It would be a place in which the public realm was admired and where open spaces were there to be enjoyed by all - instead of by drinking gangs, as is often the case now - and where litter and dog excrement would be banished from the streets.
These things matter to the authors of the report because, primarily, it is about quality of life for the people of the city.
But the board, on page 98 of its report, says that monitoring of the comprehensive list of objectives will depend on the quality and timeliness of the information it receives from the various agencies who have signed up to it, such as Cork Corporation, the IDA, Cork/Kerry Tourism, FÁS, Enterprise Ireland, trade unions and educational bodies, and the various service providers.
The intention, says the board's chairman, Mr Jim Corr, a former lord mayor of the city, is that the report will not languish on official desks, gathering dust, but instead become a plan of action.
Visitors to the city and Corkonians alike will want this blueprint to work, but it would have been more convincing if there was an accountability timetable - a date after which the agency which neglected to make the required input would be asked to explain to the public why it had failed to do so.
The suspicion is that, because there will be so much overlapping, no single body will carry the can. And while many elements of the plan could not have been costed directly at this stage, many others could, and should have been, so that the board would be in a position to show - at a reasonable set date in the future - how elements of the plan were being financed, to what extent, and by whom.
The report holds out the prospect of a safer Cork, a cleaner and more pleasant city, in which the public services function properly to make daily life more attractive. It envisages an outward-looking city, sure of its past and confident of its future, in which there will be a sound employment basis, infrastructure will continue to attract overseas investment and where there will be proper care for the less-well-off.
The agencies which contributed to it will be judged not by what they would like to see happen but by what does happen in the years ahead.