A leading architect is calling for Irish pubs be protected to prevent the construction of more hotels in the capital.
Roisin Murphy, who presents Home Rescue on RTE, is campaigning for our beloved bars to become UNESCO sites considering they’re an important part of Irish culture.
She told Newstalk: “It is not hard to describe. We all know what it is.
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“You go into an Irish pub and they are probably one of the most democratic spaces in the world.
“You can go in on your own. You can go in with a bodhran or a piece of music and join in a session somewhere. Likewise, you can discuss the politics of the day – but they are incredibly sociable and very unique Irish spaces.”
The TV presenter and conservation architect believes that there is a strong case for adding the nation’s older pubs to the list of Irish items of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
If a pub is included in the list, it will be safeguarded for future generations.
She added: “We are under threat from the financialization of our streets.
“From the global, kind of, march on our streets to put hotels everywhere.
“We are seeing huge evidence of that in the city centre of Dublin.
“On the programme we went to visit the Cobblestone and I was saying it immediately – you are kind of saying, this is such a valuable piece of our culture.”
Roisin is set to present a new documentary called Roisin Murphy’s Big City Plan to illustrate the capitalism problems in Ireland.
She told the Independent: “You don’t want to go into Dublin city centre and just see loads of hotels or kind of Wetherspoons pubs, so the idea is that you value your cultural uses, not just your buildings.
“It’s not just about the Mansion House or big architecture preservation, it’s also preserving the smaller shop or the living over the shop and their use.
“If you preserve those uses, it stops too much greed happening because obviously if you’ve got to preserve the small pub or shop, it forces the developer to control what is put on the ground floor.”
Roisin Murphy’s Big City Plan will air this Thursday at 10.15pm on RTE One.
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