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It is not quite as famous as Murphy’s law but in Ireland Parkinson’s Law of triviality might be the one we should pay closer heed to.
This ‘law’ – named after the famous historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson – observes the human weakness for getting caught up in trivial details at the expense of the bigger picture.
To illustrate his case, Parkinson put forward an imagined committee in charge of developing a nuclear reactor.
This committee then spent as much time worrying about what material to use for the staff bicycle shed as other critical elements of the project.
People sometimes refer to the ‘law’ as ‘bike-shedding’ – a term which has taken on a whole new meaning in the vocabulary of Ireland over the past six months.
Last July, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Office of Public Works seeking details of how much had been spent on a new bicycle shelter for Leinster House.
It was one of hundreds of such information requests that I submit each year to a whole range of public bodies including government departments, local authorities, hospitals, and state agencies.
That particular Sunday, I wrote a story – just 435 words in length – sent it to the national newspapers, and got ready to enjoy the rest of the day.
Unwittingly, I had just thrown a hand grenade into the court of public opinion.
The €336,000 cost of the project was described as ‘inexplicable and inexcusable’ by Taoiseach Simon Harris and became a meme on social media.
It was dissected at the Public Accounts Committee, raised in general election debates, covered by the BBC and the Guardian, and became a touchstone for public anger over spending of taxpayer money.
Yet, in the greater scheme of things – it was a miniscule project, loose change when set against for example the €2 billion-plus cost of the National Children’s Hospital.
What it did carry though was resonance and meaning.
The cost of the Children’s Hospital, whether it eventually ends up being €2.2 billion, €2.3 billion, or €2.4 billion can be a little too abstract.
Every extra €100 million that gets added to the bill would build nearly 300 Leinster House bicycle sheds, but that’s not so easy to quantify mentally.
A €336,000 bicycle shelter though? That carries every day meaning. It’s the price of building a house or thereabouts.
When we think about a sum of money like that, it’s tangible – we all know what we could do with it if we had it.
But when we think about €100 million, what would that buy us and what exactly does it look like?
How does a lay person – or indeed a journalist – tell the difference between two major projects, both costing the same amount of money?
Which one of them was too expensive? And which one was executed to near perfection and achieved maximum value for money for the taxpayer?
There was a certain bitter irony in the bicycle shelter story too.
A few years ago, I spent months working on a documentary with RTÉ Investigates and reporter Paul Murphy about the operations of the Office of Public Works.
The programme highlighted a series of OPW projects, cases where land was purchased, or leases were signed at a sometimes-tremendous loss to the taxpayer.
This included the €30 million purchase of the still-idle Thornton Hall in North Dublin for development of a ‘super-prison’.
The programme featured a lengthy contribution from Allen Morgan, a retired valuer from the OPW, who courageously went public about his experiences working in the public sector.
He and a colleague had once prepared what was known as the ‘five-case review’, a few cases (or basket cases) from the annals of the OPW.
‘We were just asked for examples,’ Morgan said, ‘We didn’t think there was much point in giving twenty [cases] and we certainly could have.’
Yet the programme, despite airing on primetime TV, did not garner a fraction of the attention that the much simpler story on a bicycle shelter in Leinster House did.
And maybe the word ‘simple’ is what is key.
It is so much harder to get to grips with these larger projects, with their complexity and the often-enormous sums of money involved.
In the wake of the bicycle shelter story, there was considerable sound and fury from the public, the political sphere, and the public sector.
There were promises that this would not happen again but how likely is that really?
For any long-time observer or reporter on Irish society, these stories crop up as steady as a metronome.
They follow a similar pattern: revelation, outrage, a vow of reform, before being forgotten. Direct accountability is almost always absent.
PPARS, e-voting machines, the FÁS Science Challenge programme, the Kilkenny flood relief scheme; there have been so many it becomes hard to remember.
But if lessons are being learned, what are those lessons? Is it a Department of Infrastructure as has been suggested by the Taoiseach Simon Harris?
If it is the answer, it is hard to find a single person in public service and procurement who agrees.
A recent headline in the Irish Times sums up the conundrum we all face when it comes to public spending, most especially mega-projects.
A rail spur to connect Navan to the Western Commuter line is now expected to cost €3 billion, according to National Transport Authority forecasts.
It will comprise forty kilometres of new track running through predominantly agricultural land and the development of three new stations on the route.
As a project, it ticks so many boxes – reducing congestion, reducing car dependence, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
But how do we assess its cost? Is the €3 billion estimate too high or too low? How long should the project take and how long will it take?
More transparency around these projects would help. But more than that, we need a better system of communicating the development of public infrastructure; experts in the field – architects, planners, and engineers – using social media and the media to explain the nuances and complexities.
There is a glaring knowledge gap in how these projects are funded and developed. And until that gap is filled, it remains extremely difficult to hold public bodies to account for how they are executed.
Present Tense is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2024.
It is not quite as famous as Murphy’s law but in Ireland Parkinson’s Law of triviality might be the one we should pay closer heed to.
This ‘law’ – named after the famous historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson – observes the human weakness for getting caught up in trivial details at the expense of the bigger picture.
To illustrate his case, Parkinson put forward an imagined committee in charge of developing a nuclear reactor.
This committee then spent as much time worrying about what material to use for the staff bicycle shed as other critical elements of the project.
People sometimes refer to the ‘law’ as ‘bike-shedding’ – a term which has taken on a whole new meaning in the vocabulary of Ireland over the past six months.
Last July, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Office of Public Works seeking details of how much had been spent on a new bicycle shelter for Leinster House.
It was one of hundreds of such information requests that I submit each year to a whole range of public bodies including government departments, local authorities, hospitals, and state agencies.
That particular Sunday, I wrote a story – just 435 words in length – sent it to the national newspapers, and got ready to enjoy the rest of the day.
Unwittingly, I had just thrown a hand grenade into the court of public opinion.
The €336,000 cost of the project was described as ‘inexplicable and inexcusable’ by Taoiseach Simon Harris and became a meme on social media.
It was dissected at the Public Accounts Committee, raised in general election debates, covered by the BBC and the Guardian, and became a touchstone for public anger over spending of taxpayer money.
Yet, in the greater scheme of things – it was a miniscule project, loose change when set against for example the €2 billion-plus cost of the National Children’s Hospital.
What it did carry though was resonance and meaning.
The cost of the Children’s Hospital, whether it eventually ends up being €2.2 billion, €2.3 billion, or €2.4 billion can be a little too abstract.
Every extra €100 million that gets added to the bill would build nearly 300 Leinster House bicycle sheds, but that’s not so easy to quantify mentally.
A €336,000 bicycle shelter though? That carries every day meaning. It’s the price of building a house or thereabouts.
When we think about a sum of money like that, it’s tangible – we all know what we could do with it if we had it.
But when we think about €100 million, what would that buy us and what exactly does it look like?
How does a lay person – or indeed a journalist – tell the difference between two major projects, both costing the same amount of money?
Which one of them was too expensive? And which one was executed to near perfection and achieved maximum value for money for the taxpayer?
There was a certain bitter irony in the bicycle shelter story too.
A few years ago, I spent months working on a documentary with RTÉ Investigates and reporter Paul Murphy about the operations of the Office of Public Works.
The programme highlighted a series of OPW projects, cases where land was purchased, or leases were signed at a sometimes-tremendous loss to the taxpayer.
This included the €30 million purchase of the still-idle Thornton Hall in North Dublin for development of a ‘super-prison’.
The programme featured a lengthy contribution from Allen Morgan, a retired valuer from the OPW, who courageously went public about his experiences working in the public sector.
He and a colleague had once prepared what was known as the ‘five-case review’, a few cases (or basket cases) from the annals of the OPW.
‘We were just asked for examples,’ Morgan said, ‘We didn’t think there was much point in giving twenty [cases] and we certainly could have.’
Yet the programme, despite airing on primetime TV, did not garner a fraction of the attention that the much simpler story on a bicycle shelter in Leinster House did.
And maybe the word ‘simple’ is what is key.
It is so much harder to get to grips with these larger projects, with their complexity and the often-enormous sums of money involved.
In the wake of the bicycle shelter story, there was considerable sound and fury from the public, the political sphere, and the public sector.
There were promises that this would not happen again but how likely is that really?
For any long-time observer or reporter on Irish society, these stories crop up as steady as a metronome.
They follow a similar pattern: revelation, outrage, a vow of reform, before being forgotten. Direct accountability is almost always absent.
PPARS, e-voting machines, the FÁS Science Challenge programme, the Kilkenny flood relief scheme; there have been so many it becomes hard to remember.
But if lessons are being learned, what are those lessons? Is it a Department of Infrastructure as has been suggested by the Taoiseach Simon Harris?
If it is the answer, it is hard to find a single person in public service and procurement who agrees.
A recent headline in the Irish Times sums up the conundrum we all face when it comes to public spending, most especially mega-projects.
A rail spur to connect Navan to the Western Commuter line is now expected to cost €3 billion, according to National Transport Authority forecasts.
It will comprise forty kilometres of new track running through predominantly agricultural land and the development of three new stations on the route.
As a project, it ticks so many boxes – reducing congestion, reducing car dependence, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
But how do we assess its cost? Is the €3 billion estimate too high or too low? How long should the project take and how long will it take?
More transparency around these projects would help. But more than that, we need a better system of communicating the development of public infrastructure; experts in the field – architects, planners, and engineers – using social media and the media to explain the nuances and complexities.
There is a glaring knowledge gap in how these projects are funded and developed. And until that gap is filled, it remains extremely difficult to hold public bodies to account for how they are executed.
In this article, Ken Foxes recalls his role in exposing the series of controversies surrounding public works spending, the opaque nature of procurement, and what the state can do to better communicate the nature of these developments.
Read
In 2015, an estimated one million people entered Europe in search of a better life [1]. Driven by conflict and hardship in regions across Africa and the Middle East, refugees and migrants began establishing migratory routes, with many first arriving in southern European cities like Athens. I visited Athens in October 2015, when borders were still open, and the impact of the influx was palpable. Migrants gathered in public spaces across the city, waiting for the opportunity to continue northward. Nearly a decade later, Dublin has emerged as one of their chosen destinations.
Smog regularly shrouds the identity of the city of Athens and, like the negated identity of the city, the migrant’s individualism is hidden within the general term of ‘refugee’ or ‘migrant’. Like migrants in Dublin, they are an overlooked presence in society. The vast numbers that appropriate the streets reach a saturation point, and their excessive visibility normalises their vulnerability; their neglected state goes unnoticed.
The urban fabric of Athens is shaped by the polykatoikia, a residential typology that forms a homogenous concrete landscape symbolising structure and order. The ground floors of these buildings, often housing commercial shops, typically extend out toward the street, with storefronts showcasing goods to entice both locals and tourists. However, amid Greece's economic recession many of these commercial units were left vacant, creating spaces that had relinquished their original purpose, with residential space occupied above.
In Dublin, the inverse is present – streets become inhabited, and homes fall to ruin. Buildings lie dormant, shops remain shuttered, and migrants occupy the space outside in public parks, neglected street corners, and undercrofts between city blocks. Deprived of formal spaces, they adapt – carving out niches within these leftover spaces. Here, new uses arise, as migrants imprint a new meaning onto these areas, illustrating de Certeau’s notion of space defined “by its users, not by its makers” [2]. These urban inversions reveal social functions, and the inequalities, embedded within the city’s structure.
One can observe the migrant to be trapped, both literally and metaphorically, somewhere between their homeland and their future home, belonging to neither. For many, Athens is but a transitory stop en route to final destinations like Dublin. In both cities, the streets become waiting rooms, as migrants tend to slip into the interstitial spaces clustering together where the city is void of life. Since Covid, city centre occupation has been cast aside by Athenian and Dubliner, in favour of the suburbs and a working-from-home culture. This exodus has created ambiguous spaces that “belong to everybody and nobody” [3], allowing for alternative forms of occupation by those without other options. These spaces of leisure, such as city squares or pedestrian zones designed for strolling, dining, and sightseeing, juxtapose with migrants’ makeshift domestic activities – sleeping in public parks, bathing at public fountains, or scavenging for food. Migrants, like discarded objects, can become “matter out of place” [4], and in their new context they are overlooked because their new identity has yet to be defined. These “waiting rooms” underscore the migrants' vulnerability and the visible yet unnoticed aspect of their existence.
In both Dublin and Athens, everyday life subtly reveals the social contrasts shaping these cities. Simple acts like airing laundry highlight the divisions within society. In more affluent areas of Athens and Dublin, laundry retracts internally, as some regard the obtrusive display of laundry as a marker of poverty and disorder. In the more affluent areas of Athens, the balcony is no longer associated with domestic chores but with leisure. The allocation of additional space internally and economic provision of dryers allows the task to be internalised. In contrast, the polykatoikia facades serve as supports for drying racks, with undergarments displayed unashamedly beside household linens, giving glimpses of the inhabitants’ lives. The facades of the polykatoikia recede, drawing focus to the laundry and blurring the boundary between public and private realms.
For migrants, the technique of laundry is radically transformed, driven by their context and estranged from their origin. The lack of resources and mechanisms to launder obliges the migrant to forsake the clothes they choose so carefully for their journey. Their acceptance of donated clothing is an initial signifier of their acceptance, whether willing or not, of a new social identity in their host country. Once they find a stabilising presence, their clothes become suspended on incongruous objects that once restricted movement – such as chain-link fences. Like the migrant’s identity which has been altered, the chain-link fence is read anew, and hints at their creativity in repurposing their context.
Whether the clothes are draped over a fence, or hung on balconies of the polykatoikia balconies, the smoggy air of Athens knows no boundaries and it subjects the migrant, the local, and the tourist to the same atmospheric conditions – creating an invisible platform of equivalence, curbing any difference previously uncovered through the indexical system of laundry. In Dublin, the same conditions must also emerge.
In this article, Shelly Rourke explores migratory patterns of movement and inhabitation, through reflection on both Athens and Dublin, and the inequalities inherent within these patterns – inequalities of both social displacement and of the structures repurposed to allow a modicum of normality in people's daily lives.
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Irish vernacular architecture, characterised by its thoughtful integration with the landscape, offers more than just aesthetic value; it embodies a philosophy of living that is both environmentally sustainable and culturally meaningful. As contemporary society increasingly prioritises sustainability and the preservation of cultural identity, these traditional practices provide essential insights that can inform modern architectural approaches.
Vernacular dwellings, which are often overlooked as outdated, are in fact sophisticated examples of sustainable design and construction. These structures were carefully crafted using locally sourced materials, such as stone, wood, and thatch – chosen not only for their ready availability but also for their ability to harmonise with the surrounding environment. The design of these buildings was inherently responsive to the local climate and cultural context, while features like thick stone walls provided natural insulation and thatched roofs offered superior thermal performance and ventilation. Despite their historical significance and environmental value, many of these buildings have been neglected as rural areas have faced depopulation, and modern construction methods have become the norm.
The recent revival of interest in vernacular architecture presents a unique opportunity for architects to explore and reimagine sustainable practices grounded in local traditions. By preserving and adapting these traditional structures, architects can address pressing issues such as the erosion of local cultures, the need for sustainable building practices, and the challenge of integrating new construction into historically and environmentally sensitive areas along with delivering much needed development to rural regions of the country. These buildings serve as living examples of how architecture can be both functional and reflective of a community’s identity, providing models for how contemporary design can engage with historical context in a meaningful way.
The preservation and study of Ireland’s vernacular buildings offer significant lessons for both renovation and new construction. These structures should not be seen as relics of the past, but rather should become deeply embedded in the cultural and environmental fabric of the landscape. They represent a way of building that is resourceful, respectful of the natural world, and intimately connected to the land. The durability and effectiveness of local materials which have been proven through their long-standing use could be embraced and their use supported, with stone walls, thatched roofs, and lime plasters stand as both functional and aesthetically compelling construction elements.
Vernacular construction methods can also be seen to inform modern architectural practices. For example, an emphasis on using locally sourced materials can reduce the environmental footprint of construction projects, whilst also supporting local economies and fostering a sense of community. This approach encourages a rethinking of contemporary building practices, moving away from the reliance on generic, mass-produced materials toward those that are contextually appropriate and environmentally sustainable. The RIAI Guidelines for the Conservation of Buildings [1] offers practical guidelines on how architects can achieve this balance between creating modern homes, and preserving both the heritage and character of these buildings.
For architects, the study and application of vernacular buildings offers a profound opportunity to engage with issues of sustainability, cultural preservation, and environmental stewardship. The principles of vernacular architecture provide a valuable framework for re-thinking the relationship between the built environment and the natural world. The revival of traditional practices should not simply an exercise in historical preservation; it should be a forward-looking strategy that can inform the development of buildings and communities that are resilient, sustainable, and culturally resonant.
As Ireland continues to navigate the challenges of introducing advanced construction methodologies, the need to balance progress with preservation has become increasingly critical. Guides like Caring for our Vernacular Heritage [2] offers a model for achieving this balance, providing a blueprint for creating buildings that are sustainable, culturally significant, and connected to the their place. By embracing these principles, the architectural community in Ireland and beyond can foster the development of homes and communities that are not only functional, but also living embodiments of the landscape and culture from which they emerge.
The exploration of vernacular architecture should not merely be academic exercise, but should form a vital practice, significantly informing the ‘making’ of architecture. These traditional methods, rooted in a deep understanding of the environment and culture, offer invaluable lessons for contemporary architecture. Traditional skills are required to achieve this type of architecture, and these skills should be fostered through apprenticeship programmes, and the development of guideline documents such as the RIAI Skills Matrix for Conservation Projects. As we look to the future, drawing on this rich heritage will be essential in creating buildings and communities that are sustainable, culturally rich, and deeply connected to the natural world. Through reimagining the principles of the past, as architects, we can build a present that honours and preserves Ireland’s architectural legacy, ensuring that it remains a living, breathing part of the landscape for generations to come.
Ireland’s architectural heritage is a reflection of the country’s deep connection to its natural environment and cultural roots. In this article, Ellen Meaney explores the value of Irish vernacular architecture – through connections to the landscape, its sustainable credentials, and the materials of its making.
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