'Suas' on the 'squays'

Why stop at cable-cars? Michael Smith proposes a fully-fledged ski resort for Dublin‘Plan for cable car attraction on Liffey' was the headline on Frank McDonald's story in last Saturdays's Irish Times on a “daring plan” for to erect a “sensational” cable car linking Heuston Station via Wood Quay with Spencer Dock. Although daring plans often appeal more to architects than to ordinary people – who, at least in Ireland, mostly just want good plans – this one would “celebrate the river, bringing the two sides together in a quite remarkable way”, so we'd have to take it seriously. “The €52m project would involve erecting four giant towers, two of them significantly taller than Liberty Hall”, wrote McDonald. “Like all bright ideas, it is a sensational example of lateral thinking.” The plan is, he told us, inspired by London Eye.  How is it inspired by London Eye? wondered the nation's hungover middle classes as they ate Saturday brunch. Does it look like a ferris wheel? Does it look like an eye? Does it speak with a Cockney accent? No. To be honest, it looks like a series of elbows linked by string.  Think washing-line on metal boomerangs. London, my eye.
Everyone who presented themselves to McDonald for inclusion in his article could scarcely hold onto themselves, so great was their enthusiasm. Ordinary people may mock, but the city fathers are holding to the public interest.  “Chief planner Dick Gleeson and city architect Jim Barrett are certainly enthusiastic about the plan, which they see as a dynamic way of stitching the city together along the spine of its main river.”  Far better that those who run our city should focus their civic enthusiasm on cable cars over the Liffey than on public transport, getting in some green spaces or keeping vomit off the streets. Cable cars it is. The developer, Barry Boland, was reported to have presented his plans earlier last week to senior Dublin City Council officials. “Their response, not surprisingly, was enthusiastic”.    
Just in case anyone thought it might be too crassly useful to Dubliners, the scheme will cost a prohibitive €15 per trip and is “designed as a tourist attraction rather than a transport service”. Dubliners have enough  material stuff so we should do it completely for the tourists. Let's face it, transport hasn't really worked for Dubliners, so let's give up on it and try something new that focuses on tourists, who are much better with these things anyway. Sort of the Book of Kells on wires then. But no, why not be braver? Do justice to the Celtic Tiger with its can-do, the sky's-the-limit energy. Let's make Dublin into a fully-fledged, world-class mega ski resort. Long-term, locals on the slopes – like trucks on the quays – would be banned. Our gift to tourists, in return for taking our huddled masses, for coming here during the Quiet Man years and giving us all those structural funds.
So there's seldom any snow: well why not add an über-snow-machine to the city's tallest building that is to be constructed for U2 in Docklands. If backward Dubai can manufacture lush greenery and water from the desert, why can't fashionable Dublin become the world's biggest ski destination? Snow would cascade down the quays (to be renamed the “squays”) and off via Heuston and Lucan to the borders of Kildare. We already have the infrastructure. The Smithfield ice-rink could be extended to Castleknock and the fake ski slopes at Kilternan lengthened down to Deansgrange. New outlying resorts would grow up. Martin Cullen would organise just the right amount of private sector involvement. Killester would be Klosters. Welcome to “Bally-Zermatt”. The begrudgers are gone and a new generation will simply not be told “thus far and no further”. Winter sports festivals would take the place of the boring old summery ones.  The Liffey Swim would no longer be possible, but we could have the Liffey Luge. Temple Bar wouldn't just be the cultural quarter: it would be the aprés-ski quarter. The pools of drinkers' vomit would colourfully fleck the spreading snow as it swooshed down from Docklands. We will need mountains, but that will be no problem if we just re-use the spoil from Tara. With Heuston serving as a sort of Mont Blanc to Spencer Dock's Matterhorn, the Civic Offices would be reconfigured as Swiss chalets, with nursery slopes along the “squays”, red slopes down Dame St and black slopes around Dublinia in Christchurch. Off piste will be provided in the Liberties and Coombe and toboganning down the Liffey boardwalk. Prince Charles and his family have reportedly already spoken about spending six months in Dublin annually.
Dublin's wits have already been hard at work finding new names for the exciting new tourist-transportation event. The “Suas” is in the ascendant for the moment.
Fired up by the public reaction to the cable car and final recognition of this new “lateral thinking”, Dublin City's architecture Department is already testing the  best way up for new thinking generally. A team is reportedly pursuing a circular-thinking revolving artichoke (modelled on London's sensational gherkin), the vertical-thinking Spite (taller than, and next to, the Spike but with lighting that works) and the subterranean-thinking world's deepest building, which is to be tunnelled under Temple Bar.
Still, Dubliners are notoriously conservative when it comes to grand projets. They rioted when the government built the Custom House as they did for poor Hugh Lane's prescient Gallery-over-the-Liffey idea. And latterly the cynics are increasingly getting it wrong. The begrudgers said they'd never reinstate the trams and some of us were sceptical about those fine boardwalks. So let's not laugh. We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars (or cable cars). And Frank McDonald is never wrong.