Ego-massaging silly signs blight landscape

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

It’s amazing how the State blights our landscape with signage and gets away with it.

Take these two ugly yokes, pictured. One sign is opposite Barna Church on the way into the village; the other is in Knocknacarra at the roundabout between the Ballymoneen Road and Western Distributor Road.

Both are too big, both are needless.

The one on the way to Barna is reminding motorists about Scéim Séarachais Bearna, which is the Barna sewerage scheme completed a few years back.

Why bother? The sewerage scheme is great and has helped to clean up Galway Bay but why do we need a big massive sign on the side of the road, blocking the view of the Burren, Clare and Galway Bay, to commemorate it?

Is this what tourists want to see on the main road to Connemara?

Do the locals give two hoots about it either? Who cares who the engineers were or whether Roadbridge built it or not; or that Tobin’s designed it – why give them free advertising, haven’t we paid them enough for the work already?

The one thing people living in Barna will remember about the sewerage scheme itself was the horrendous traffic tailbacks during the road works; and the long delays in finishing it.

Is that what the signs are for – to commemorate the delays and tailbacks?

The same is true of the sign at the roundabout, ‘celebrating’ the fact that the European Union paid for the Western Distributor Road. It’s ridiculous.

Who gives a fiddler’s flute who paid for it or what engineer was involved in designing it or what contractor built it?

Couldn’t the money wasted on these signs be put to better use, like for more signs advising motorists to slow down, or belt up? If you put up posters on lampposts you could be fined; yet local authorities put these stupid signs up with impunity, to pat themselves on the back.

And if they must erect signs for this sort of backslapping nonsense, any chance they could make them a bit smaller, or do the protagonists involved in these projects have such big egos that they need massive signs to keep them happy?

And as for this nonsense about National Development Plans – look where they got us, controlled by the Troika! – and EU funding.

What do the equivalent signs in Europe’s economic powerhouse Germany say?

Instead of ‘The EU part-funded this scheme . . .’ perhaps something like: ‘You’ve paid for this scheme 10 times over’ (in Deutsch, obviously).

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.