Madam, – How low can they stoop? The country has been pauperised by property gamblers and their friends in government. Thanks to a recent Bord Pleanála decision, we now have the unlovely sight of the sun rising on the faux-White House in BallyVegas (Baile na mBréag, perhaps?) to console us in these straitened times.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Step forward, Michael Lowry, and take a bow. Your rank weed has burst into resplendent bloom. This is perhaps Mr Lowry’s finest hour. However, given the social devastation inevitably wrought by casinos, it is a very sad day for the rest of us. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Reports that a new casino and leisure development in Tipperary is to include a 500-bed hotel and a replica of Washington’s White House is indeed a throwback to the thinking of the good old Celtic Tiger days.
Thanks to various tax-breaks, Ireland has a complete over-supply of visitor accommodation and certainly does not need another hotel.
Few foreign visitors will come to Ireland to gamble and view a White House replica.
We need to promote our strong points of culture, heritage, scenery and food, thus developing a holiday experience unique to our island.
Should it proceed in its present form, this development will be more White Elephant than White House. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – One wonders what bank/banks dare lend over €500 million for developers to build this carbuncle on our landscape in Co Tipperary. Will the taxpayers again carry the can? – Yours, etc,
Madam, – A key portion of the proposed casino development in Two-Mile-Borris will be, we are told, a faithful reproduction of Irishman James Hoban’s original design of the White House.
The only marketable point to a replica of the White House in north Tipperary of which I can think might be the willing suspension of disbelief and the buying into the illusion that one is in the real seat of American power. To that end, the most (and to most people the only) recognisable aspect of the interior of the White House is the Oval Office.
Tourists who might wish to have their photograph taken behind the Resolute Desk in Two-Mile-Borris might face a small problem however: Hoban’s original, 1792, White House didn’t have an Oval Office. President Taft had the West Wing, with its central Oval Office, built in 1902, with President Roosevelt ordering extensive renovations and the building of the current Oval Office in 1934.
Franklin Roosevelt, whose physical disability was not known to the public, helped to design the placement of the modern Oval Office (on the south-east corner of the West Wing and leading out to the colonnade overlooking the Rose Garden) to afford him more privacy and allow him easier access to the White House residency.
The American cartoonist Thomas Nast is often credited with coming up with the ultimate image of Uncle Sam. What is less known is that he was also responsible for creating the symbols for both of the current American political parties. In 1870 he gave the Democrats their donkey and four years later he invented the symbol of the Republican party: the elephant.
It is unclear whether he would have coloured that elephant white. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Quite apart from the socially destructive effects of gambling, the decision to approve a casino for the heart of Co Tipperary has another worrying implication.
Our tourism brand is founded on a rich culture, beautiful scenery, and a warm, welcoming personality. The proposed casino is anathema to that brand image, as it is to the families and communities of Tipperary.
With visitor numbers in decline, are we now to allow a development more suited to the vulgarity of Las Vegas to be built in the heart of Ireland? In the long run, it can only be damaging to our tourism industry. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Once we were to have Manhattan in Dublin 4, now we face the prospect of Las Vegas in Two-Mile-Borris. It beggars belief that in a country littered with ghost estates and zombie hotels this grotesque parody of all that was most vulgar about the Celtic Tiger could strike anybody, but particularly the members of An Bord Pleanála, as remotely appropriate to a small village in rural Tipperary; and yet it has secured approval, helipads and all!
Thankfully, as the type of idiot developers and their banker buddies who would once have conspired to bring this abomination into being have long since impoverished each other and the Irish taxpayer, it will remain a mere figment of the fevered imagination of Messrs Lowry and Quirke and the councillors who, mesmerised by the prospect of the “between 1,350 and 2,000 additional full-time positions” it is “expected” to create, granted this gargantuan folly planning permission in the first place. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – This carbuncle in the Tipperary countryside will feature “a full-size replica of the White House in Washington” (Home News, June 13th). Given the state of the nation’s finances, wouldn’t a full-size replica of Der Deutschen Bundesbank be more appropriate? – Yours, etc,