Bypass special: road rage over kids’ crayon routes

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

The new city bypass, or the N6 Transport Project as they’re calling it, has stirred serious road rage. It’s like they took a map of Galway City, whipped out a Crayola crayon box, and let children draw lines through it to come up with route corridors.

Clever little clogs those kids – they managed to hit the areas and landmarks that would cause the most annoyance to the most amount of people.

As if burrowing through Ballybrit Racecourse and bulldozing NUI Galway campus aren’t bad enough, the routes plough through the core of Menlo, before taking out homes in Newcastle, Dangan, Bushypark and Barna, splitting those communities.

If you tried it’s hard to imagine how you could annoy more people. But if that’s what the consultants are trying to do, then why stop there? Perhaps they could divert the red-route through the middle of Eyre Square, and then swing right to take out Galway Cathedral, as well.

Sure we already know revamping Eyre Square can be done without, ahem, any hassle. And sure, the Cathedral, is it really that important anyway?

Politicians fuming

Galway City Councillors turned out in force at recent meetings organised by residents groups to garner support against the bypass.

Most councillors who spoke were, predictably, against the routes proposed. But all were fuming afterwards.

The Councillors looked around at the people in the room who were speaking. Many of them were constituents, who were calling on the politicians to support the fight against the bypass routes.

Fair enough, sure isn’t that what voters do?

Except what had the Councillors seething – privately, of course – was that many of those calling for politicians’ support were voters who hadn’t bothered to vote.

Not many people know but politicians have access to the marked voting register. This is the list of names of people who have voted. When you go to the polling station, show your polling card, you are ticked off the list, which confirms you voted.  Politicians have access to the list.

Obviously they don’t know who you voted for but they know whether or not you bothered to vote.

Apparently there were quite a few at the meetings – some of them very vocal too – who hadn’t voted.

“And they now have the cheek to ask us for help when they couldn’t be arsed to vote last May,” snorted one peeved politician.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.