Urgent work needed on Coole N52 - councillors

Now that work has been all but completed on the Mullingar stretch of the N52, pressure is being applied on the National Roads Authority (NRA) and Westmeath County Council to attend to the more dangerous parts of the road in rural north Westmeath.Labour's Cllr. Dan McCarthy and his colleagues demanded that action be taken to secure three danger spots on the stretch of the N52 between Turin and Delvin, and on to Clonmellon.Cllr. McCarthy, speaking at last week's Coole Area Committee meeting, called for a “complete new stretch of road” to be installed at Hiskinstown and Williamstown, Delvin, in order to cut out a dangerous turn at Joe Flynn's house, and an even more notorious bend at the home of local man Larry Poynton.“Larry recently had to rebuild the boundary wall outside his house,” he said, explaining that over the past fifteen years, the Williamstown blackspot has been the site of some horrific accidents over the past fifteen years.“There are two Poynton families living on that bend, Larry and his wife, and their son and his family,” Cllr. McCarthy said. “They are afraid of their lives that they'll have another incident like the one where a lorry overturned, and dumped all of its load in the garden, just metres away from where children were sleeping.” He said that he realised that “an enormous amount of money had been spent on the N52”, but that attention needed to be paid to the stretch of the secondary road within the Coole Area.Cllr. McCarthy was supported by Fine Gael's Frank McDermott, who said that plans already exist to bring a new, straighter road from “behind Joe Flynn's house” as far as Poynton's.“The land was bought, and the pegs are down,” he said.But Ray Kenny, the Coole Area Director of Services, said that it was important to reiterate that the NRA have been “hugely helpful” with regard to the N52.However, he said that the re-alignment design for Williamstown will be “advanced next year” in consultation with the NRA, while the bend at Hiskinstown will be investigated by the Council's Road Safety Officer, along with an NRA Safety Inspector. Recent works on the N52 outside Mullingar included a new stretch of road at Rathconnell, the re-alignment of the route at Killynon Cooke and Killynon Pratt, the construction of a new road at Macetown, and the installation of ghost islands for traffic at Cloughan.“But the Coole Electoral Area is the only remaining section,” Cllr. McCarthy said.Meanwhile, Fianna Fáil's Cllr. John Shaw asked officials to have digital safety signage erected at the stretch of the N52 between Delvin and Clonmellon, which was the location of a road tragedy this year.He said that this would be a temporary safety measure along an “extremely dangerous” road.