Never heard of it but has to be worth a shot - thanks
PS passing it onto my mate ref his dad
Donal Skehan
1 Like
Paddle boarding 
I dunno Fagans, I got a pang of sadness when I realised Doey could no longer ‘freewheel’ in the kitchen. It’s like Maradona playing in goal.
Harry Crosbie: ‘They won’t give me a VIP pass and free membership – now I can’t go to the venues I created’
The colourful developer talks to John Meagher about a ‘lack of respect’ from the operators of the places he put on the map, how Dublin has changed for the better and the advice John Banville gave him when starting his new literary career
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‘You can’t run art on handouts’: Harry Crosbie at his Vicar Street venue in Dublin. Photo by Frank McGrath
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John Meagher
October 30 2021 05:00 AM
](John Meagher - Independent.ie)
Harry Crosbie has something he wants to get off his chest. “Ask me,” he says before our interview begins, “if I go to gigs and the theatre any more.”
It is a curious request, but he is insistent, so midway through a wide-ranging conversion, the topic comes up. He says he refuses to go to shows at the 3Arena — or the Point, as calls it, using its old name — and the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre.
The reason soon becomes clear. Crosbie was the mastermind developer behind both Dublin docklands venues, but he lost control of them after the late-2000s crash. He had requested that the current owner of both, Live Nation, give him honorary membership, but his wish has not been entertained. He is sore about it today.
“I was refused a [complimentary] membership of the VIP club in the Point by Mike Adamson [Live Nation chief executive for Ireland]… I said to him, ‘I helped you open this place. Not only did I found this place and run it on my own, but the idea of turning it sideways and taking out the sidewall and putting the stage there that made it into one of the great venues in the world was my idea’. And he said, ‘It is company policy — you can’t have a [complimentary] membership.’
ARCHIVE VIDEO: Docklands Business Awards Harry Crosbie OBE
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- Harry Crosbie: ‘They won’t give me a VIP pass and free membership – now I can’t go to the venues I created’
“The result of that,” Crosbie adds, “is that if I have a ticket and I go down [to the 3Arena], I have to stand in a public queue. When I went down last, before the Covid, so many people came up to me and said, ‘What are you doing standing in a public queue?’ I got embarrassed and I came home. The result is I don’t go to the Point.”
He becomes exercised by what he sees as a lack of respect. “Free membership forever,” he believes, is not an unreasonable ask. “I built the shagging place and they bought me out for nothing.”
He hasn’t been in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, thanks to the beef with Live Nation, for some time. Its distinctive sloped roof, designed by the star architect Daniel Libeskind, is something he sees every time he leaves his front door. Crosbie lives in a large, remodelled 18th century warehouse on Hanover Quay, a few kicks of a football away from the theatre.
“It’s just a sad state that someone like me can’t go to the Point or the theatre that I invented,” he says.
Review puts Crosbie’s grievances to Live Nation. A spokesperson says it’s a “no comment” from both the company and Mike Adamson.
Crosbie has helped shape the skyline of Dublin for 40 years and has long been regarded as one of the country’s more colourful developers. At 75, he is showing few signs of wanting to stop and there’s a new chapter in his life that he is keen to talk about.
Last year, he published a slim book featuring 12 short stories he had written during lockdown. Now the Dublin publisher Lilliput Press is bringing out an expanded version, with several more stories, many of which are inspired by Crosbie’s boyhood and early adult life in and around the docklands of Dublin.
“Did you read it?” Crosbie asks, when Review calls to his home. “ All of it?”
If this normally bullish figure seems a little sheepish about the book, Undernose Farm Revisited , it’s because it is his first foray into literature.
“I never had a lesson, I’d never done it before and I had no idea whether it was good, bad or indifferent,” he says. “I’m really good at business and opening venues, but this was a new yoke.”
Crosbie says that over the course of his reading life he frequently told his wife, Rita, that he could have written some of those books too. “‘Would you stop saying that’,” he recalls her saying in exasperation, “‘and just do it’.”
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John Shelving reciting Jame Joyce to Gay Byrne, Harry Crosbie, John Banville and John Boorman in 2018. Photo by David Conachy
Lockdown gave him more free time than he knew what to do with, so his writing life began. “I asked a couple of mates of mine, including John Banville and John Boorman, the movie director, and I said, ‘Do you know anywhere I could go to a class about writing?’ and they said, ‘Guys like you don’t need to go to classes — just do it and see can you write’. So I wrote the first story — ‘Eighteen and a Half’ — and I took it to the guy in Lilliput, who I’d met at [former U2 manager] Paul McGuinness’s house at lunch and he said, ‘That’s not bad, do another one’. So I did, and another and another.”
that’s only about a quarter of the article
That statement reeks of TNH. I doubt many people who frequent the 3 Arena would recognise Harry Crosbie
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I mean, clearly that never happened 
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A touch of the Pee Flynns about that. The levels of entitlement.
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That’s why Harry lost the venues , no resilience, no fight.
Went home because he had to stand in a ‘public queue’
No balls Harry
I liked the bit where he said he “invented” the theatre, rather than just built it
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Wonderful line
Harry of all people should realise that there’s no sympathy in this game for anybody.
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Imelda May
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How much has the quisling Crosbie cost the taxpayer
Harry had a hotel at the back of the vicar St venue pulled last year because of the covid outbreak. It was some monstrosity of a thing.
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I heard last night from an impeccably well placed source that herself and Ryan Tubridy have engaged in mutually consensual inappropriate behaviour!
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Fucking hell what a stupid cunt 
is it possible the Sindo deliberately do this when they show these entitled fucknuts up for what they are?
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She can’t be that badly stuck ffs
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