Playwright’s complaint about lines – but these are on a road

Well-known playwright Jimmy Keary is at loggerheads with bureaucracy as he battles to have road markings reinstated on his country road between Rathowen and Streete. Speaking to the Westmeath Examiner this week, Jimmy vented his annoyance at the refusal of Westmeath County Council to mark this busy road after they resurfaced it.

“It is very frustrating because the lack of road markings makes you feel the road is being downgraded. Why were they necessary on this road since I was born and now they aren’t?”, he asks. He feels this is a money saving tactic and he is determined to take the matter up with local councillors when they next come looking for his vote.

According to Jimmy, a few kilometres of the road, the L1927, were resurfaced last September but the white lines were never restored. He said that on querying that, he was told that the elected members of Westmeath County Council had agreed last year not to restore markings on local roads after resurfacing – in order to slow down traffic.

If that is the case, it hasn’t worked on this road, Mr Keary claims. He says the council believes motorists will be more careful if there are no white lines, but he demands to know what study was carried out to prove that.

He claims that speed is a problem on the road in question and that on a few occasions he has met cars over too far on the wrong side of the road, on a bend where there were no markings.

Jimmy has also been on to the ombudsman but was told that as the issue was a reserved function of the local authority members and not an executive function, the ombudsman was powerless to deal with it.

The section of road in question runs from the junction at St Mary’s Church, Rathowen. “It is an extremely busy road as it connects the N4 with Granard, Cavan and onwards,” and with “Coole, Castlepollard and Oldcastle”.

“At the moment we have the ludicrous situation where we have white lines at the church that disappear and then reappear beyond my house, some two kilometres away,” Jimmy said.

He said he received a commitment from Westmeath County Council last May that the possibility of putting up signs would be investigated, but “no signs have gone up”. Recurrent flooding is another problem facing users of that road and it needs to be sorted, said Jimmy, who feels “we are neglected and forgotten out here”.

Jimmy will be well known to theatre goers and has penned many popular plays. One of them was staged in Prince Edward Island, Canada last year, when performances before a limited audience were permitted, but this side of the Atlantic nothing has been happening.

“It’s very difficult to write in a vacuum,” said Jimmy, but he revealed that he does have one play waiting in the wings for some group to perform and he has another in his head.