Tourism flagship building all set to make its final bow

Call me nostalgic, or sentimental, but I believe that when a major building in the modern history of a city like Galway seems about to ‘make its final bow’, then the event should be marked. That’s why the decision last week that gave the go-ahead for the demolition of the Corrib Great Southern Hotel should not go without a mention.

As yet, we do not know what precisely will replace the building . . . the indicators some time ago would appear to have been that the space would be marked by something as unremarkable as a car park. Maybe, in other times, before the economy fell off the cliff 18 months ago, it might have been replaced by blocks or apartments, or some ambitious project involving houses, apartments and shops.

It is sad to see what I would have regarded as one of the ‘tourism flagships’ of Galway, disappear. It is still a fine building, it is surely in an ideal location for an hotel – on the eastern approaches to a city which is daily getting nearer to Dublin, and to markets on the eastern side of the country. Just a few years ago it had a fine reputation as an upmarket hotel and conference centre that seemed to be trading well. 

One of the problems with the decision to close and sell the building which was taken some years ago was that, certainly in my memory, we never got a breakdown in the figures as to how the hotels in the Great Southern Hotels chain were functioning on an individual basis.All of the hotels in the group were under the wing of the Dublin Airport Authority which made it abundantly clear that it might know about running airports, but it did not want to know anything about running the hotels chain. It simply wanted to get them off its books.

The crisis broke some years ago when, in a statement to the annual meeting of the Dublin Airport Authority, it was made quite clear that the hotels were losing money, but perhaps even more importantly, that the DAA wanted nothing to do with the hotels. They were simply an encumbrance on a body which was wrestling with a huge development in Dublin and regarded anything in Galway, or Cork, as of nuisance value and a distraction.

However, for a time, those with a sense of history, and with a knowledge of the previous years, might have considered that maybe someone would again step in to save one of Galway’s most important pieces of tourism infrastructure – and I say that despite the fact that over recent years, we had had the construction of thousands of hotel bedrooms, many of them funded by tax breaks that seemed to go on forever and took no logical look at the eventual maximum possible size of the Irish hotels market.

There was a time when a slightly different attitude was taken. I have to go back to that old rascal Charles J Haughey who, when he was the man in charge of the moneybags, answered a direct appeal on the future of the Corrib Great Southern, by asking for a detailed case to be made, and then announced that there would be a multi-million investment package which was aimed at making The Corrib a conference venue, and growing its potential business, and giving it a real spruce-up.

For more read page 17 of this week's Galway City Tribune