The newest visual arts development in the country this year, the restoration of a four-storey riverside granary building for use as a new arts space in Cork, is well on its way to completion.
It is called the Wandesford Quay project and will house a courtyard complex of print workshops, studios, a commercial exhibition gallery, sculpture yard, community room, computer area and restaurant.
It's seven years since printmaker Ms Pat Mortell of the organisation, Cork Printmakers, got interested in finding artists in the city a permanent and suitable workshop.
By coincidence, a group of Cork artists, the Backwater Artists' Group, was thinking along the same lines.
The common objective was to establish a fine arts centre outside Dublin and give local artists a place where they could work in surroundings that were stimulating and conducive.
Michael D. Higgins, the former minister for the arts, was interested, as was the Cork politician and former junior minister, Toddy O'Sullivan, who played an important role behind the scenes.
Submissions were made to Mr Higgins's Department, to the Arts Council and to Cork Corporation. Various proposals were put forward.
Now the builders are in at Wandesford Quay, not far from the Labour Exchange in Cork, one of the areas of the city that has come alive again through the local authority's urban renewal scheme.
The artists wanted a secure tenancy in a purpose-built building. Now they will have it.
The Department made available £500,000, the Arts Council a further £250,000. And the local authority agreed to convert the old granary into the type of building the artists were seeking.
They will now get their new studios and workshop after working in dismal conditions for many years.
The arrangement is that Cork Printmakers and the Backwater Artists' Group, which are both client organisations of the Arts Council, from which they get an annual subsidy, will pay £16,000 a year rent to Cork Corporation.
All this fits perfectly into the philosophy behind the project which is that a stable tenancy is invaluable to an artist's work.
Though a little bit like Temple Bar Studios and Gallery in Dublin, it's different in one major respect: the Wandesford Quay commercial art gallery will have virtually nothing to do with Cork Printmakers or the Backwater Artists' Group.
There will be 30 artists' studios in the complex and, says Vera Ryan, a lecturer in the Crawford College of Art and Design who has long been associated with the project, when completed next spring it will give Cork something special.
When she told a consultative forum organised by the Arts Council in Malahide, Co Dublin, about the £1 million project earlier this month she emphasised how much can be achieved when there is energy, imaginative thinking and goodwill behind a project.
"In the Arts Plan 1995-98 Cork was made a centre for excellence in the visual arts. The plan recommended three-pronged approaches to the development of the arts involving local authorities, the Arts Council and the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht. We hope this project may be seen as a model for such strategic partnership," says Vera Ryan.
It could not have happened without the Corporation's enlightened approach to the arts.
The printmakers' community in Cork numbers about 50, and as well as benefiting them the commercial parts of the complex will be a new attraction for tourists. Facilities such as the restaurant will be run by a holding company whose board will include representatives from the artistic community in the city.
One of the stars of the project is Deirdre Nolan, founder of the Backwater Artists' Group. Her relentless enthusiasm inspired the project through its most difficult stages, helped in no small way by Fiona Carey and Brian Kennedy of Cork Printmakers.
Whether the complex is ready for official opening next April, May or June depends on how the work goes, and there will be a major exhibition to get it off to an auspicious start.