Street politics: life in the slow lane
THE bright yellow gorse that splashes the roadside between Cork and Carrigaline glows in the early summer sunshine, and the young leaves on the trees glisten and sway in the breeze.
A passing motorist has plenty of time to admire nature’s adornments on this stretch of road, no matter what time of day it is.
Long past the breakfast rush hour and well before the evening equivalent, the stream of cars is still so dense it’s hard to pass the 40km/h mark.
During rush hour, the traffic shuffles along so slowly that you could count the stripes on the bumblebees feeding off the gorse flowers.
For Carrigaline commuters, this is where the estate agent’s promise of “only seven miles and 10 minutes from Cork” becomes a taunting joke. For a start, Carrigaline is a good 12 miles from Cork city centre, and that journey can easily take an hour.
That’s especially true if the mode of transport is the bus that must shun the relative freedom of Cork’s southern ring road and meanders its way torturously through the city’s suburbs.
Traffic and transport are Carrigaline residents’ two biggest gripes.
“When Carrigaline was a village of 300 people, there was a train service. Now there’s a population of over 16,000 and no train,” says chairman of the Carrigaline Community Complex, Michael Wall, referring to the long abandoned Cork-Crosshaven line that used to stop in Carrigaline.
“It doesn’t make sense. We’re killing the place with cars. We should have a light rail system with a population this size. A Luas would do us fine.”
Carrigaline’s experience over the past decade is typical of satellite towns all over the country, where population has exploded while infrastructure and amenities failed miserably to keep up.
Ten years ago, there were just over 7,000 residents and car usage in the town was already the highest in Ireland, with two-thirds of workers driving to their place of employment.
Today, the population has more than doubled, and enough land is zoned for it to reach an estimated 25,000.
In one new housing estate, Herons Wood, there are more than 600 homes — an entire village in itself.
The development is well-designed and immaculately finished, but its sheer size puts pressure on a road structure that has remained largely unchanged despite rapid housing growth.
Other large developments — of 200 and 300 houses a time — are popping up all around Carrigaline. Heron’s Wood, at least, spills out its commuters directly on to the Cork road.
Others empty onto narrow roads designed to support thin ribbons of one-off housing, before steering residents down the almost continuously choked Main Street.
“It can take 20 minutes to drive through the Main Street,” says Martin Goulding, secretary of the Carrigaline Community Association, describing conditions on a bustling central thoroughfare, which can be strolled end to end in 10 minutes.
Geography has both blessed and cursed Carrigaline. Situated at the head of an estuary — where the Owenabue River flows into an inlet from Cork Harbour — it has natural beauty in abundance.
But the same quirk of nature causes problems for the town. Across the estuary is Ringaskiddy and its massive concentration of chemical, pharmaceutical and industrial plants.
The same road out of Cork serves both areas. Crosshaven, a few miles away, at the mouth of the estuary, is a magnet for tourists and leisure users, particularly during sailing events, and its traffic also goes through the town.
A relief road has been proposed for the western outskirts of the town since 1996, but there is little faith that it will resolve the issues.
“One of the dangers is that if you put in a western relief road on the outer extremities, you are possibly opening up more land for development,” says Martin.
“We want the western relief road but with a stay on the development, otherwise it won’t actually bring relief.”
His doubts are not helped by the town’s newest link road, essentially a service road for 700 houses in two large developments.
A more ambitious solution would be an eastern relief road on the seaward side of the town, with a bridge or causeway across the estuary.
Michael has long dreamed of a causeway which would have the dual effect of creating an amenity area for boating and water sports. Another complaint close to residents’ lips, is the lack of leisure facilities, especially for young people.
Michael is meanwhile preparing a planning application for an all-weather soccer pitch at the community complex — part-funded by State grants, with the rest coming from fundraising.
“We need all-weather facilities and we need facilities for young people who don’t like sports. I’d love to see a youth cafe where they could hang out, listen to music, play pool, chat, compare mobile phones — whatever they do to relax.”
Martin agrees. “You see kids hanging around the streets and people equate that with making trouble. The majority of them are no trouble at all, but there is a perception and that leads to mistrust. We have 4,000 to 4,500 under-18s and if even 10% of them fall outside the net of the sports clubs, that’s over 400 kids hanging around ... You can’t just ignore them.”
Michael points out that Carrigaline had a cinema and dance hall when the town consisted of a few hundred households. Now it has neither, although are plans for a new town centre development including a cinema and bowling alley.
Just as Carrigaline’s only swimming pool is part of the local hotel leisure centre, the cinema and bowling alley will also be privately owned. Michael would prefer to see publicly owned facilities in the town.
“With all the development that’s going on, and all the money that the council’s getting (in development levies)... it should be possible to put the investment back into the area.”
There are heavy demands on the public purse in the area. Some of the new estates can’t yet be accessed from the town by footpath, while sewage from Carrigaline is still pumped untreated into Cork Harbour.
Although badly needed, the imminent prospect of work beginning on a main drainage scheme, causing further traffic disruption, is not appealing.
Despite its size, meanwhile, Carrigaline does not have a full-time garda station and is served out of hours from the nearest 24-hour station at Togher, in the south of Cork city.
The town is only getting its first health centre this year and, even then, there are concerns about the extent of the services it will provide.
“What we could really do with is an X-ray service and a physiotherapist and occupational therapist to save people having to go into Cork.
“As far as we know we’re not getting anything like that. We haven’t been told,” Martin says.
Carrigaline’s wish list for the upcoming election contains small items as well as the big ones. Martin wants a local bus service on a continuous circular route of the town, to serve new estates and keep short car journeys to a minimum. Michael is looking for a bus service running between the town and the factories in Ringaskiddy, concentrating on the morning rush, lunch and the 8pm changeover for shift workers.
“These aren’t major things. They’re the kind of thing you’d automatically put in place if you were planning for the kind of population growth that we’ve had. Our biggest problem is lack of planning,” he says.
“We’re not anti-development but there is supposed to be checks and balances to make sure development doesn’t get out of hand or run ahead of infrastructure and amenities. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happened. Carrigaline has so much going for it,” Martin says.
“We have the city on our doorstep, the airport out the road, the ferry port close by. We are surrounded by beaches, we have Currabinny Woods a few miles away and the countryside is only a stone’s throw away.
“The thing that is absolutely frustrating is that you forget all the good points when you’re stuck in a line of traffic going nowhere. What’s also frustrating is that these were the same things we were talking about five years ago at the last election. What we need most from this election is government, local and central, that listens to us.”
TONY O’REILLY is an accountant, originally from Carrigaline, who moved his office from Cork city to the town 18 months ago but failed to leave all the hassles of city life behind.
“I was delighted at the thought of no more traffic jams but here the jams might be smaller but they’re in a smaller place so it’s all relative. I could walk through town faster than drive it — that’s the same as in Cork.”
He has concerns about the town both as a resident and a ratepayer.
“I’m a ratepayer and I’m dealing with ratepayers in my work and they’re wondering what they pay their rates for. Every six months you get a bill and wonder what services are attached to it.
“The council dug up the road last week and businesses weren’t consulted as to when it would happen so it just happened unannounced and people lost business. Ratepayers feel powerless. If, for example Galway City Council got sued over the water crisis there, they’d just put the rates up to make the money back. Councils have a monopoly on power and they see rates as limitless source of money.”
He believes Carrigaline should have a town council as he feels it would help to have locally-elected representatives pushing local issues.
Mr O’Reilly and his wife have decided their year-old daughter will eventually go to a school outside Carrigaline, a half-mile further from the town but easier to reach: “I tried to walk up Main Street with the buggy the other day but forget it. When you’re on your own you take your life in your hands but with a child it’s a complete obstacle course.”
ANNE GARVIN works part time as office administrator at the Community Complex and is married with an 11-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter.
The family lives four miles outside Carrigaline and love the country life but they rely on the town for all basic services so there is no escaping the congestion.
“We’d be as close to Crosshaven but there isn’t even a garage in Crosshaven so we have to come in to Carrigaline. What used to take me 20 minutes to drive a couple of years ago now takes 30.”
Ten minutes isn’t much, she concedes, but if it takes another 10 in another couple of years, her journey time will have doubled — a real possibility, she fears.
Anne considers herself lucky that her children are involved in sport but she is concerned about the lack of other social outlets for them as they get older.
“I know they’ll want to go into Cork and that’s fine but the last bus leaves Cork City at 11pm, including weekends, and taxis, when you can get one, cost at least €20, so I’ll be expecting phone calls to come in and collect them at all hours.”
Ironically, one of the other downsides of the population explosion is a shortage of volunteers for the community organisations she is involved in. “There are more people than ever around but everyone’s so busy just getting from A to B or with both parents working to pay a mortgage that nobody has time to volunteer any more.”
Location: South west of Cork city, seven miles from the city boundary.
Population: At least 16,000.
Constituency: Cork South Central.
Political representation: Five TDs — Micheál Martin (FF), Batt O’Keeffe (FF), John Dennehy (FF), Simon Coveney (FG), Dan Boyle (Green).
