IT IS AN exciting time to live in the Irish capital. Dublin is changing right before our very eyes.
Naturally enough, you’d expect this column to spend roughly one thousand words obsessing over the proposal to erect a 35-metre-tall homunculus in Dublin’s Docklands, but fortunately, that’s already been taken care of. And at the end of the day, The Giant still seems sort of unlikely to happen, so this week let’s focus for now on some of the city’s developments that are locked in, final, and opening very, very soon.
Where to begin? Ah, of course. With the National Children’s Hospital! Oh, I’m sorry, I’m just getting word from my producers… What’s that? ‘Not even close’, you say? Well, I’ll be damned.
It was confirmed this week that the National Children’s Hospital still isn’t open and, in a stunning climbdown, there are actually no longer any plans in place for it to open at all. I mean sure, it might open one day. I’m just saying they’ve got nothing planned.
Having been assured that the hospital would be functional by 2022, then 2023, then 2024, of course 2025 and eventually 2026, the latest news on the children’s hospital is that developers BAM have no idea when it will open. It’s sort of like the TFI real-time app, only instead of a bus to take a few dozen people a few dozen miles, it’s a hospital to help thousands of sick children.
February 2025 is when health minister Jennifer Carroll McNeil told us that the project was “98%-99% complete”, a phrase obviously calculated to give the impression that all that was left to do was straighten the letters on the sign above the door. In actual fact, Carroll McNeil said that this estimate came from BAM themselves. So if you’re wondering who the buck stops with, the answer is… nobody, I guess? Much like the construction of the hospital itself, the buck actually never stops!
When the National Children’s Hospital catastrophe is discussed, it’s often speculated that it’s the most expensive hospital in the world, with costs now at well over €2 billion. But this isn’t quite true! Not because it isn’t one of the most expensive buildings ever built, of course it is, but because it’s not actually a hospital yet, is it? As of now, the structure is little more than a pointless rearrangement of building materials that sits in the south inner city, taunting us all. For that kind of money, we could have had 57 giants! We could have a whole stockpile! We could probably have trained them to be doctors. Giant doctors.
Going from one development we all desperately want to see finished to another that nobody asked for, dozens of objections have been raised in the past week pertaining to the plans to take Stephen’s Green Shopping centre and turn it into something that looks like it belongs on the front of a brochure called something like ‘So You’ve Decided To Sell Your City’s Soul’.
Much has been written about why the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre’s iconic facade and internal architecture should be preserved, and I shan’t over-extend myself in that regard. I don’t want to change because I like it the way it is. I’m a stakeholder, aren’t I? Too many of my teenage Saturday afternoons were spent in Asha for me to be ignored on this matter.
There’s also the redevelopment of the Phibsboro Shopping Centre, which is similarly tragic, in the sense that we will be losing one of Dublin’s most hideous buildings. Why are we so afraid of the exceptional in this country? Why can’t we have a hulking, concrete monster that looks like it needed to be built in a hurry after a 1940s firebombing that also has an Eddie Rocket’s right there at the bottom of it? Is this what the film The Brutalist was about?
Granted, we must sound intractable. “No, you can’t possibly change Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, it’s too beautiful! No, you can’t possibly change Phibsboro Shopping Centre, it’s too ugly!”
But strange as it might sound, maybe it’s possible that those of us who live in Dublin have developed a sort of attachment to the place. A fondness, if you will. Maybe there are things about Dublin that the people who live in Dublin actually like? Maybe there are things that we don’t want to change.
It is therefore welcome that the redevelopment of Stephen’s Green has been paused for now, owing to an objection by a man named Oliver Donogue based in Athlone. Now all I need is to get Oliver on board with my ‘Save the Phibsboro Shopping Centre because it’s awful’ campaign and we’ll be laughing.
But it’s been a worrisome week or so for me personally, threatened as I am by the emergence of James Lawless, Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, as Ireland’s hottest new columnist.
Lawless, with the aid of AI, wrote an article for the Independent last week, headlined ‘I used AI to help write this article – all Irish workers should have the skills and confidence to use these tools’. It’s a thoughtful suggestion. While I can only speak for myself, I would argue that the reason anyone is hesitant to use AI isn’t because they ‘lack confidence’ — they’re not trying to shift the AI at a disco — it’s because it’s being foisted on them in increasingly hamfisted ways that don’t appropriately acknowledge the many drawbacks that seem to come along with it.
In the middle of the Minister’s column are hyperlinks to three related articles. The first titled ‘AI allowing foreign countries greater automation in conducting cyber attacks, Oireachtas committee to be told’. The second: ‘Doctors warn of AI diagnosis dangers as distraught patients get false medical advice’. And the third? Are you wondering if it’ll make AI sound like a good thing or a bad thing? ‘Too much reliance on AI erodes ability to make an effort, study shows’.
Even the minister’s own op-ed encouraging us all to get on board with artificial intelligence makes him sound totally terrified of it. ‘This is not something that is going to happen in the distant future. It is happening now, and Ireland must respond with direction and agility’. You know something’s going to be good for society when you’re told you need to respond with ‘direction and agility’, two famously fun states of being. He’s speaking about it the same way he’d speak about a tsunami about to make landfall.
In engaging AI for help with this article, Lawless says he used it ‘not to generate ideas or make judgments, but to help organise points and work more efficiently,’ which is a pretty unspecific way to extol the virtues of the technology. Lawless doesn’t actually provide any details as to what he asked the AI to do for him, what sort of prompts he gave it, what kind of answer it gave, or to what extent he had to edit or check the AI’s work. In short, he uses an argument based on anecdotal and unspecific premises to support a conclusion that aligns with an obvious personal or professional agenda.
And columnists really don’t need AI to help with that.