Archive News
Council spent Û40,000 on rectifying new Moneen lights
Date Published: {J}
The growing cost of the so-called ‘smart lights’ at Moneenageisha Junction is set to exceed €600,000 after Galway City Council continued to spend more than €10,000 a month rectifying the chaos that followed the installation of the lights.
An internal report obtained by the Connacht Sentinel reveals that consultants and engineers known to have provided flawed data for the controversial traffic light system were nonetheless re-engaged by the cash-strapped council and paid additional sums to rectify the logjam they had created.
The document has sparked outrage among a number of city councillors, who have described it as a “comedy of errors”, an indictment of the council’s initial planning of the junction, and “an acknowledgement of failure of the original plan”.
The cost of the signalised junction up to May 2009 when it first opened was in excess of half a million euro. However, the report from the Directorate of Transport and Infrastructure reveals that the council quickly became aware that “the system was not working very well” and causing knock-on traffic delays at adjacent junctions.
Contractors were recalled at least six times to make changes to the system between June and December last at a cost of at least €40,000. The cost of much of the renovations could not be provided by the council because work was still ongoing, and formed part of a separate contract.
Councillor Padraig Conneely has described the project as one of the worst examples of wasteful spending in the history of the council and said commuters had been treated like “guinea pigs” as the local authority proceeded with alterations to the junction on a “trial and error” basis.
“Galway City Council spent more than €100,000 on consultants and engineers to provide traffic modelling to plan the junction, and their own report shows that this advice was dysfunctional,” he said.
“Yet they still paid more money to the same consultants to remedy their own mistakes; effectively rewarding their failure to do the job properly in the first instance.”
Local councillor and resident Brian Walsh said that the signalisation of the junction had had a worsening effect on the traffic mayhem that existed when it was controlled by a roundabout.
“There has been no improvement whatsoever in the traffic flow to justify the colossal sum that the council has paid out,” he said. “The advice of the consultants involved in the original traffic modelling has to be questioned and I am not happy that additional fees were paid to the same consultants who had provided flawed advice in the first place.”
The report details how Transport Planning International (TPi) were paid to produce a traffic model and introduce a cableless fixed time plan to coordinate Moneenageisha Junction with Lough Atalia Junction in June 2009.
However, the document states that “this resulted in a less efficient junction” and longer queues on College Road and Lough Atalia Road. After just a few days, TPi were recalled and engaged to abandon the fixed time plan and to change the junctions back to their original state.
It is also reported that the original timings derived from a model produced by TPi that predicted traffic flow was quickly found to be at stark variance to the actual flow when the junction opened in May. This caused “longer queues and delay for vehicles passing through the junction than was predicted”.
Elmore Group, who had been paid €73,321 under the original contract, was subsequently re-engaged to make alterations to the timings of the signals at a further cost of €5,517.50.
The series of admissions of such difficulties dealing with traffic chaos following the opening of the junction conflicts with information provided by the city council at the time, according to Cllr Conneely.
“This totally vindicates my criticism of the junction, which I expressed in a letter to the City Manager last July. His response denied any difficulties peculiar to Moneenageisha and contained no indication that the council was in the middle of crisis management in relation to the junction as we now know it was.”
Director of Services Ciaran Hayes said that the scale of the Moneenageisha Junction project had to be recognised and that it was always anticipated that there would be teething problems.
“This was a major undertaking at a junction that caters for over 50,000 vehicles a day and further works were always going to be required. The pre-existing roundabout was probably the greatest congestion point throughout the entire city,” he said.
Mr Hayes claimed that the traffic lights were now working “quite well” and refuted that the signalisation of the junction had added to road users’ commuting times.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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