Waterford North Quays

looking forward to also seeing the plans! I hope the city gets a tall unique building. Something iconic.

What would be an iconic building for Waterford ?

A lot of tall buildings are often offices and I can’t see big office buildings being justified anymore anywhere in Ireland really. Maybe an apartment building like the Elysian in cork but if it’s not a very functional building it is hard to see the finances making sense.

People say how the retail element is not justified at the moment but equally the office space is not justified. We either scrap both in favour of housing or actually go for a bit of Vision and offer both.

Perhaps that's actually whats delayed Harcourts plans, they've rejigged the plans and turned the office space into housing. Which is basically happening in a lot of places right. Everything is being thrown at housing right now to the detriment of all else.

Brand new A rated latest generation offices will be in demand once the market self corrects which will be around the time these come onto the market

I’m not so sure, WFH (full time and hybrid) is the name of the game for a large amount of jobs now and one of the top requirements for people looking to change jobs. The types of company still really needing offices are usually with jobs tied to manufacturing or hands on R&D and just have the offices in industrial estates with the rest of the business.

I can’t see a demand for these types of “statement” offices for office only roles around here or elsewhere in the country. Just last week I heard of another IT business closing its offices and moving staff to fully remote as no one was going in and offices were lying mostly empty.

I think a mix of residential and some retail are the most probable uses for a tall building going forward. Hotels also but probably too big a hotel for around here and also a can of worms during the housing crisis.

It depends how the next few tech revolutions play out. At the moment there is a staff recruitment crisis in almost every sector of the economy, due to demographics, abundance of education and global mobility.

If AI, robotics and quantum computing really take off we'll see a large increase in automation of processes that could end the staffing crisis and potentially allow for a 4 day or even 3 day working week for most people, with the traditional office becoming even rarer.

If governments get scared they'll bury new tech with regulation to maintain a traditional worker-consumer led economy. Only time will tell. Best to not plaster new office blocks all over a new area though, especially not in a housing crisis and hotel shortage.

I heard on the grapevine that if Harcourt don't get the ball rolling in the short-term a back-up proposal is to use the NQ's as car parking and take the current Quay based car parks out of circulation. Probably makes sense (in the short term).

They could do it very easily if the price was right!

Why not build something like the High Line in New York on the Waterford side of the river. Say from the Clock Tower to the Plaza.

Which beggars the question… "WHY?"…. to look down @ the manky Suir in the wind n rain??

Any perhaps one day you will learn how to spell old boy! Three mistakes in just the one sentence. Tut! Tut! You will have to suffer my observations from time to time. It's what we call the concept of "free speech".

Beggars the question?

Begging the question means "to elicit a specific question as a reaction or response," and can often be replaced with "a question that begs to be answered." 

It's mainly a train station, not a bus station. I think Bus Eireann are keeping the current station as the main bus station. You seem to be assuming that an interchange and the main bus station are one and the same.