Trevor Connolly, Drogheda BID on street art, vacancy, online-retail, & remote working impacts

It's got a fantastic community spirit, the largest town in Ireland, a great business mix and a good retail mix.

It has wonderful culture and heritage.

If you're talking the proximity to Brú na Boine, you have Old Bridge you have the Mellifont Abbey you have Monaster Boyce you have so much culture and then you have the River Boyne there at the weekend you had the Santa Maria replica ship that came into Drogheda port again you have all that maritime history as well you have the likes of Thomas Charles Wright and you have a whole host of people that have helped shape Irish history and culture as well.

And

we're seeing glimpses of that through the artwork behind and the murals and the lighting displays.

So maybe just give us an overview here of what we're looking at.

Absolutely.

So that was one of the first projects our board undertook, is the Drogheda Urban Art Trail.

So we were looking at ways to reinvigorate unused or underused spaces such as the laneways.

So we decided we would try and develop a mural project.

So we worked with our partner in Dreyhead Arts Centre.

We used some money from Drogheda Business Improvement District to avail of Irish Arts Council funding and then we got a number of artists from across Ireland and Europe to come in and deliver a series of eight murals focused on Irish mythology and of the place of the Bowen Valley and tell those stories in a unique way.

So as you can see on the wall behind us we have the story of Ammergen, the Dagda, Bowan, the Morrigan and we have eight in total.

and the river goddess actually she was invoked very recently actually in terms of resistance to a property development and I thought that's the first time I've heard a river goddess invoked for that particular purpose but it just shows you know how locals respond to place and actually how have people both kind of local residents and visitors to the town responded to these?

This has been possibly our most popular project.

People absolutely love the artwork.

They love seeing the artists when they're actually in town and working on them.

And then it's a renewed appreciation of the stories of old.

Some people would know the children of Lear or the Salmon of Knowledge.

less people would know the story of Amergin or the Dagda or Bowan so we're delighted to bring them to the forefront and also working with Dredd Arts Centre has been fantastic there's an outreach program to the local schools as well and it gives us great joy here in this office when in May and June you see all the school tours coming up and down the alleyway which you know wouldn't generally be frequented during the day by school kids but they're there listening to the stories and hopefully in years to come they'll be telling their kids about those stories as well.