‘Rubbish idea in the first place’

Councillors discuss – again – town centre enhancement

Mullingar traffic

“We will get a pile of rubbish back from the same people that came up with the rubbish idea in the first place,” stormed Cllr Andrew Duncan on hearing that an assessment is to be carried out that will provide solutions for traffic management in Mullingar.

Cllr Duncan was speaking at the May meeting of the Municipal District of Mullingar Kinnegad, where he again asked that the roundabout at McDonald’s in the town centre be reinstated.

Cllr Duncan claimed that a bottleneck was deliberately created at that junction in the hope that people would not come into town. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “the only solution is to take out the traffic lights, put back in the roundabout and put in a filter lane.

“We will still have the town enhancement scheme, but we will have traffic flowing freely through the town.

“We were told that if it didn’t work, we could modify, we could go back over aspects of it. We know it doesn’t work,” Cllr Duncan said.

He pointed out that he had raised the issue in 2021, and Cllr Ken Glynn had raised it in 2022. “I remember the last time I brought it up, hearing that there would be traffic issues or dangerous pedestrian issues – all rubbish lads!”

“It’s our town, they are our businesses, our ratepayers, and we need to protect them.”

The outcome of the study “is not going to make a blind bit of difference, if anything, it is going to make things worse”, Cllr Glynn contended.

He said people were talking about the issue and it was a priority in his election literature; he remarked that the proposal had already been unanimously approved by the members as long ago as 2017.

Cllr Glynn thanked the director of services, Deirdre Reilly, for agreeing to talk to businesses directly. He said he wanted all businesses to have a say because they will confirm the impact traffic delays are having on them directly. He acknowledged that Pat Kavanagh, district engineer, and his team have done a lot of “tweaking” – but the problem remains. Cllr Aoife Davitt said she had previously asked for the data that had been collected from investigations carried out when the town enhancement scheme actually happened. She called for that data and for an update on how the lights are working at the moment – wait times, volumes of traffic, pedestrian usage of the lights. “We have to look back before we look forward,” she said.

Cllr Davitt said traffic is regularly backed up from Nugent’s Corner to the Dublin Road and down towards the town centre. She said vehicles turn on the road outside a secondary school “which is really not safe” as cars are parked on both sides of the road. Drivers are waiting eight cycles of the lights on Millmount Road, and all that has a huge impact on what the junction McDonald’s, was her analysis.

Cllr Davitt said cars are avoiding the McDonald’s junction in the mornings by going through the car park at SuperValu and Cusack Park and that puts extra traffic on narrow roads along which people walk to primary schools.

Cllr Emily Wallace said if the game plan isn’t working, you change it. “We have to bring back positivity,” she said. “We have fantastic businesses and we, as a council, are letting them down every day by not being proactive in ensuring the traffic moves swiftly and can access car parks and local businesses easily, and we need to face this problem and deal with it head on.”

Cllr Denis Leonard said the bypasses are so clogged people are going through town as the easier option. “We need to get our town bus service up and running, a park and ride, all the access routes mapped and advertised, that is the only way to get a long term solution,” he said.

The cathaoirleach, Cllr John Shaw, asked when the area based local traffic assessment would be ready. It is going to have an impact from St Finian’s College to the Dublin Road, he said.

He confirmed that the data gathered had been requested on numerous occasions, but there was never any estimate of traffic numbers going through the town. People need to be able to see those numbers, he suggested. “Mullingar town is growing and we can’t keep pushing the same volume of traffic through. We have to get the business people on board and we need to have solid facts and figures,” he stated.

Deirdre Reilly, director of services, said she had spoken to the Chamber of Commerce and they accepted that “we need to work together”. She acknowledged that not all businesses are members of the chamber and assured the meeting that an open door policy would be adopted.

“As the director of services with responsibility for delivering services in Mullingar, I do take this issue seriously and I am trying, in a small way, to grapple with this issue. We need to be thinking about a parking strategy with real time information, we need to get our bus service in 2025, we need to be promoting park and ride, we need to be promoting orbital routes. It’s a whole traffic management issue and I am here to help us work through this with our new council,” she stated.

Ms Reilly said the area-based local transport assessment is due in July. She said she would see what information the council already had to send to the members.

“We are not going to get rid of the amount of cars we have in Mullingar; they are here to stay. It is a question of how we manage the traffic we have,” she said. However, she urged that “we move forward with more positive talk about Mullingar”.

Encourage people to come in and support a thriving town and businesses, tell them about the 500 parking spaces we have, she suggested. “It is the way I am hoping to move forward as director in the next number of years,” Ms Reilly said.

Cllr Duncan said that he recognised, for the first time, that the top table was genuinely trying to deal with the issue and he thanked the director for liaising with local businesses.

He said, however, that traffic delays were part of a calculated design to remove cars from the town centre. “We can have all the statistical figures we like and we can throw a huge amount of money at doing more statistical studies. I don’t need them. I can see with my own eyes, there is a bottleneck, created deliberately, it’s there,” Cllr Duncan said.

He said it was planned town congestion and warned: “If we’re not careful, we will be setting aside room for water troughs because we will be going back to the time of ass and carts.”

“We have a great town. We need to protect it,” Cllr Duncan stated. “Let’s swallow our pride, take up some of that paving there and put in a filter lane and bring back the roundabout!” he concluded.