FIONA WOODS / research / 2015 - 2021

Contested Site #4 was a co-production with an activist based in the regeneration area of Ballinacurra Weston (unnamed at his request), drawing on material assembled and produced over a period of 10+ years for an online archive called Limerick Regeneration Watch. The realities, the contradictions, the negotiations with power that regeneration has generated are documented, analysed and extensively critiqued through Limerick Regeneration Watch. For the collaborative action the activist selected Clarina Park in Ballinacurra Weston as a site that exemplifies many of the conflicting logics that characterise discourses of regeneration in Limerick.

Having been ‘degenerated’ over a period of years, 49 houses that made up the Clarina Park estate were eventually demolished, and the population dispersed in 2012, ostensibly to make way for new development. Eight years later development has failed to materialise, a fact sometimes attributed to the financial crash of 2008. Dissenting local voices see it otherwise, describing it as a ‘state sponsored land grab’ (McCarthy, Collins and Daly, 2009). Ballinacurra Weston is one of the areas identified in the 2007 Fitzgerald Report recommendations to ‘...unlock the value of lands, all of which are within a short distance of the city centre...’ (Fitzgerald, 2007: 14). The image on the right is an interpretation of a map from the Limerick Regeneration Masterplan (LCCC, 2008) which shows a number of houses around the cleared site of Clarina Park that were designated for demolition, without the knowledge of the owners, to make entrances for a new road system to support the development of an estate of new houses, which has not yet taken place.