Mayor slams Council and the Garda’ for traffic problems

Date Published: {J}

BY FRANK FARRAGHER

THE Mayor of Galway has accused the local Council and the Gardai of not being ‘tuned in’ to the seriousness of traffic problems in Galway following a week of sporadic gridlock in different parts of the city.

Mayor Hildegarde Naughton told The Sentinel last evening that following a meeting yesterday morning that she had with senior City Council officials and Gardai, she now felt that there was a ‘serious disconnect’ between the authorities and the people of Galway on the traffic issue.

Cllr. Naughton said that the ongoing scenario of traffic chaos and logjams in Galway – throughout the year and not just last week – was doing untold damage to the reputation of a city that had so much else going for it.

“I have to say that following the meeting yesterday morning with the Gardai and the City Council, I am very disappointed at their failure to try and tackle this problem as an urgent and critical issue for the city.

“Of course there are no quick-fix solutions available to this problem and I do accept that in the longer term, we badly need the city’s outer bypass, but really we just have to do better on a day-to-day basis with our shocking traffic problems,” said Cllr. Naughton.

She called for the immediate implementation of an emergency traffic management plan to deal specifically with peak flow daily times and roadworks, as happened last week.

Cllr. Naughton said that the Gardai and the City Council had to ‘bang heads together’ and come up with a plan to prevent Galway from becoming the city that will come to mind ‘first and foremost’ for being a traffic nightmare.

“I just wonder about the number of potential visitors to our city who are just striking Galway off their list because they know that they cannot travel through it without being caught up in the most horrendous of traffic jams. This is a problem that is choking Galway,” said Mayor Naughton.

She added that her gut feeling after yesterday’s meeting with the City Manager, Joe O’Neill; Director of Services, Ciarán Hayes; Senior Engineer, Joe Tansey and Garda Superintendent, Marie Skehill, was that the scale and the acuteness of the city’s traffic chaos, was not being fully grasped.

“For example there was talk about commuters ‘staggering’ their arrival and departure times from the city but the fact of the matter is that most workers do not have this kind of flexibility available to them.

“We really do need a more hands-on approach to the city’s traffic problems. Things were particularly bad last week with the roadworks, but the truth of the matter is that we have a serious traffic problem in the city from January through to December – it just gets even worse than normal at certain times,” said Mayor Naughton.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.