Mahon and Blackrock in Cork City have never had a permanent library. Why?
For decades residents in Mahon and Blackrock have been fighting for a public library. A new city development plan promises one. But, will the library ever come?
Chris O’Leary is waiting for me at the top of Avenue De Rennes, quite possibly the loveliest sounding avenue in Cork, when I pull up one morning earlier this month.
He’s ready to take me on short walking tour, the loop as he calls it, to showcase the sites that Cork City Council could build a library on.
In the 1980s, when Chris moved to Mahon, and long before he became Lord Mayor in 2015, further down the avenue a mobile library used to pull up once a month, hook up to the electricity mains, fling open the doors, and kids and parents would file in with their library cards, browse around and file back out with books. The kind of thing you’d expect at a library. In the 1980s.
As Chris recalls, the mobile library reminded him of a trailer from an Iarnród Éireann lorry. It could well have been.
The mobile library is long gone, but what remains on the map of libraries in Cork city is a giant blackspot covering Mahon and Blackrock, with a population well north of 25,000 and yet no public library.
If promises built libraries though, well then, you’d hardly fit all the books ever published into the promised library for Mahon and Blackrock.
Chris sets off walking almost as soon as we meet. As we walk he outlines that taken together Mahon and Blackrock is one of the fastest growing areas of the city; there are new developments going up in Jacob’s Island, at Bessborough, at Ursulines, and down by the local Credit Union in Mahon.
“Hundreds of houses, with families in most of them,” Chris tells me, as he proceeds to list off all the schools just off Avenue De Rennes, which include Nagle College, Gaelscoil Mhachan, the naíonra nearby, Holy Cross national school, and closer to Blackrock Ursuline primary and secondary schools.
“And up further you have Beaumount boys and girls school,” Chris says.
His point is that this is a community brimming with schools and school children. But no library.
“A library is more than just books,” Chris tells me en route to the first site. “Because if you if you look at it, if you look at the model that has been rolled out, and I visit libraries on a regular basis through my job, they act as a meeting place, they facilitate men's groups, women's groups, after school programs, all of those are facilitated in the library service,” Chris says.
By way of comparison, Chris references the well-resourced libraries at Wilton and Hollyhill, which, he says are focal points of the communities.
This is a point that David O’Brien, Cork City Librarian since 2020 echoes, when we talk by phone this week about the role a library plays in the community.
David said libraries are measured less now by footfall, in crude terms counting how many people go in and out the doors, but rather by the array of services they offer to the community which runs from story telling, music groups, meeting places, study spaces, but also a place to access printers, the internet and the infinite world bound up in hundreds of thousands of books.
David has been out to Mahon to look at the same sites that Chris is now taking me to and over the phone he tells me that the Cork City Library’s position is that they want to get a library into the area, and soon.
He doesn’t want to commit to announcing which site the library service favours, but David said he’s hopeful an announcement will be coming towards the end of this year, and with that they can start moving on the multi-stage process of planning and securing the funding to build the library.
“The message for Blackrock and Mahon is that we are very keenly aware of the needs there and at the first opportunity we’ll push it to have that done,” he says referring to the process of getting a library up and running.
Libraries, as everyone recognises are essential to a community, and yet that doesn’t mean that all communities have access to one.
Go figure.
The sites
The old Abode on the corner of Skehard Road and Ballinure Avenue site is a ruin. Before the building was torn down it could easily have ended up on social media with a #this could be someone’s house.
Chris hopes that this site along with two others close by, that one of them will become the chosen site, and soon, for the library to service Mahon and Blackrock.
What makes it more maddening and frustrating to locals such as Chris is that the sites we tour are city council owned property. This isn’t a council in search of land; it’s right there, they own it, although as Chris points out as we look at the former Abode site, the council did try to sell the vacant site for €80,000 back around 2014.
“We stopped it,” Chris says, referring to what action the residents’ took.
“€80,000 for an enormous site which you can never get back,” he adds.
Chris says he’s not opposed to selling council-owned assets, but he is against “gifting” them, or selling them below their true market value.
“We could easily have got €100,000 for this site, easily,” Chris says, adding that that money could have been put back into investing in a new library. Chris speculates that a site like this one could now sell for €1m in the current market.
In many ways the vacant lot is a perfect site for the promised library; it’s close to schools and lots of neigbhorhoods. Just across Skehard Road, over at Loughmahon Park, the greenway that’s extending out from Blackrock will pass through, creating an “active travel” access route to the site.
It would be an incredible transformation for a site that was not so long ago littered with needles having been derelict and rundown since Adobe moved further up Skehard Road.
On our way to the second site, which is across Skehard Road and closer to the school campus off Avenue De Rennes, I ask Chris about the possibility of putting the library in a site that is well visited and has public transport access links and is also in Mahon: the Mahon Point Shopping Centre.
After all, both the Douglas and Blackpool libraries are situated in shopping centres. Could Mahon (and Blackrock) not go down that route?
Chris responds with an unequivocal “no”.
“Because it’s a waste of money. We're consistently renting from private developers. It's not a standalone library and it's not a standalone facility,” Chris says, once again adding that Mahon has council-owned sites that could be transformed into a library.
It’s worth noting also that Blackpool Shopping Centre was bought by Värde Partners from Nama in 2014, a US-based private equity firm, and put back on the market in 2017 with a guide price of €117m. It was withdrawn having failed to attract significant bids. A library on publicly owned lands would not be subject to rental rates as dictated by foreign-owned private equity firms.
Looking in through the steel rails at the derelict site Chris imagines what could be done with here if the library he and many others have been petitioning for was built.
“You could have a fabulous community garden in there with horticultural classes,” he says, one hand resting on the fencing.
Mahon has been famous over the years for its allotments Chris tells me, pointing out that on the land where the weekly Farmer’s Market in Mahon Point Shopping Centre was once covered in allotments.
En route to the second and third potential sites for a library we pass through Loughmahon Park, still home to stately trees and also a playground, a basketball court and an outdoor gym. But, as Chris say, the residents had to fight too to save this green space as developers wanted to build on it, and in the 80s joyriders would come through the park crashing into trees.
The greenway will soon pass through the park and right in front of the gates of a potential library site the HSE is using for its ambulance service. That site is just next to three schools and practically on Avenue De Rennes.
The third site Chris outlines is on the campus of Nagle, and Chris says he understands discussions have taken place with Cork Education and Training Board about situating a library on the Nagle campus.
If it was up to Chris, a standalone site would be the best option, but a bigger point for him is that there’s still no signed agreement at council level for a new library for Mahon and Blackrock.
The same week we met, Cork City Council published its City Development plan for 2022-2028 and there is specific mention of the non-existent library in Mahon and Blackrock.
Objective 3.30 in that 500-page policy document states that: “To support the implementation of Cork City Council Libraries 2020-2024 Strategic Plan that includes proposals to deliver a new library facility in Blackrock-Mahon and the City Centre…”
The plans for a new City Library is a separate story, but suffice to say for nearly as long as Mahon and Blackrock have been promised a library, there’s also been a promise to build a new City Library. Both have yet to happen.
Tripe+Drisheen have sought further information from the City Council as to the wording of Objective 3.30 in the Development Plan. Essentially, we asked if it means a new library will be built to service Mahon and Blackrock on or before 2028? As of publishing this piece we have not heard back, but will update when this story when we do.
Chris, like many in Mahon and Blackrock is understandably frustrated at the progress, if you can call it that, in relation to a library in the area.
“I don't get this. I don't I don't get why an application has not been made one way or the other. Stop dithering,” he says.
An essential element of civic and community infrastructure
As recently as 2014, Cork City Council compiled a worthy policy plan for Mahon called the Mahon Area Local Plan 2014.
The library, or the lack of one, features strongly in the comprehensive document.
Correctly, it points out that “Mahon requires four essential elements of civic and community infrastructure.”
Top of that list is a library.
It then goes on to more or less outline why the former Abode site would be an ideal location for a new library, for many of the reasons Chris outlined to me.
The City Council has been exploring the options for a permanent library in the south-east of Cork City over recent years. A permanent facility is being designed for the former Abode Site at the corner of Skehard Road and Ballinure Avenue for a Part 8 planning application later in 2013. Once approved then the library can then be programmed for delivery.
Even before that site was earmarked Chris recalls how John Gormley, the former leader of the Green Party (Chris was originally a member of the Green Party before he joined Sinn Féin) was in Mahon before the economy collapsed in 2009 at a different site where a library for the area was all but promised. That too never happened.
Michael O’Sullivan, a retired bus driver from Mahon, sounds a note of weariness when talking about the library.
“Time and time the library came up,” he says. “We discussed it, sent letters, had verbal agreements,” but it was always put on the long finger. So much happened, but as Michael points out, essentially nothing happened.
“Where did the allocated Cork Corporation/Council money go,” he asked, pointing out that brand new libraries have been built in Bishopstown, Douglas, Ballyphehane, Knocknakeeny, “but still Mahon library never happened.”
Pat Magner, a longtime resident also from Mahon, told me that having a library in the locality would have made a huge difference to her kids when they were growing up.
As Pat says ,they didn’t have a computer in her home growing up; at the local library they could have been exposed to one and learned to use it.
“Access to a library would have greatly benefited the area,” she told me, adding that there’s nothing but “net benefits” with having a library in the local area.
Well before I went down to Mahon for this story, which is home to the Central Statistics Office, Mahon Point Shopping Centre and City Gate Park with its raft of blue-chip medical centres, a teacher who works in the area was telling me about what a difference a library would make for students who wanted and needed a place to study.
If you go into any of the libraries across Cork you’ll find students, and all age ranges of people, tucked away at desks, often with head phones on, their heads bent over books. There are so many services that a library offers, but even in that little bit of quiet space that might not exist at home, the library once more proves how invaluable it can be.
And that’s before you get sucked into the rows and rows of books, magazines, newspapers, CDs, DVDs and records on offer in a public library.
Michael O’Sullivan, the former bus driver told me that “everything created by the community in Mahon was done by the community with minimal support from City Hall.”
A library for Mahon and Blackrock is City Hall’s chance to rewrite that script and finally give the people of the area an institution that they have been fighting for, for more than 40 years.
Great article