BusConnects and NTA controversial plans for Cork: unique opportunity or highways to Hell?

Author and journalist Mary Leland reports on city and suburban Cork changes afoot

UCC, or bussed? The college's entrance gates may be about to see a sea-change of city traffic flows by the Lee. Pictures:  Larry Cummins

Who remembers mangolds? And why has that lamented vegetable become something of an emblem for the turmoil of anxiety, not to mention anguish, unleashed this past year in Cork by a catalogue of proposals from the National Transport Authority aimed at relieving the city of its familiar car-created congestion?

It’s a long and complex question but the answer is simply a word:

Mangala.

The name derives from the vegetables grown to feed the horses worked by the old mills at Donnybrook. The NTA’s plan to build a bridge from Donnybrook to Carr’s Hill and over that popular woodland sanctuary sparked such a determined oppositional campaign that it has become almost synonymous with the several other city and suburban groupings astonished into action by transport routes announced by the NTA in its BusConnects strategy for Cork.

Nina O'Neill and her dog Buddy at the Mangala/Ballybrack Woods in Douglas.

As with any transport plan, there are pinch-points throughout city centre and the suburbs but few more spectacular than for the Mangala, where Nina O’Neill’s vigorous campaign (pictured) to save this unique environment has been a potent reaction to the NTA. Insisting that the wooded glen should be designated as a protected area by the City Council she’s passionate in her objection to proposals which, in the unimpassioned words of the NTA, show that. ‘At the junction of Grange Road and Donnybrook Hill a new bridge is proposed…over the Mangala Valley to connect with the Carrigaline Road. The bridge will provide a footpath, cycle track, bus lane and general traffic lane in each direction.’

Changes in store for the  Ballybrack Woods at Mangala Valley, Douglas, Co Cork. A bridge over the riverside walkway and woods, linking the Grange Road with the Carrigaline Road is proposed. Pic: Larry Cummins

That amounts to an elevated highway so local indignation is no surprise especially when environmental issues bloom into focus.

However O’Neill, like fellow activist Independent Councillor Kieran McCarthy who describes the bridge as ‘an act of environmental vandalism’ is not a single-issue protester. She realises how the construction for the implementation of these routes will afflict the entire metropolitan area and believes that the programme ‘highlights what we have and hold dear. It makes us look at Cork in a new way and we can see how its character would be ripped out. It just doesn’t make sense.’

Green Party Councillor Dan Boyle throws oil on these troubled waters.

Mangala Pic: Larry Cummins 

‘There will be plenty of changes following all this consultation’, he says. While the idea of sharing the road space is something that people are going to have to accept, he feels that putting out the worst case scenario “was not the right approach by the NTA.”

Confident that “‘the Mangala just won’t happen” Boyle believes, somewhat against the current evidence, that 90% of the NTA scheme is non-contentious and that the 10% can be dealt with through public interaction and information.

The NTA’s colourful documentation with sketches depicting Edenic tree-lined roadways with few people and even less traffic describes the twelve Emerging Preferred Routes and their districts, streets and laneways. The many pages allocated to each route explain submissions, decode terminology such as land take, include a litany of acronyms, offer reassurance on compensation and promise mitigation. 

Swings, and roundabouts in store? Pic: Larry Cummins

More buses, shelters, traffic lights and flowing movement bolster the presentation of the €600 million operation.

 Occasionally, existing plans by Cork City Council are mentioned like a valuable reminder to always keep a hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse.

 After all, the Mangala proposal did not originate with the Dublin-based National Transport Authority but with the County Council’s Douglas Land Use and Transportation Strategy, and boundary extensions have now put Douglas into the City Council’s care. When asked for a comment on BusConnects, City Hall responded that the ‘NTA is best placed to provide detail on BusConnects Cork as they are leading on this.’

The communication strategy, described as ‘green-washing’ by Ronan Margey of the Douglas Road Heritage and Environment Group, could have been designed on the system of divide and conquer, with information distributed selectively so that neighbours in one estate might have no knowledge of what could happen in the adjacent avenues.

There has been also an angry local response to the summer consultation meetings arranged for a time when many people are away. The meetings themselves are tightly organised, requiring registration and apparently limiting the number and status of representative groups.

‘That’s a way of controlling the narrative’, says Margey, ‘the whole thing is undemocratic.’ He agrees, as do others, that the predicted expansion of Cork’s population demands new or accelerated transport changes but sees other solutions. “The NTA took about three years to produce the biggest infrastructural change in Cork in our lifetime and we had eight weeks to respond!”

At the community forum for the route from Sunday’s Well to Hollyhill the NTA’s Deputy Chief Executive Hugh Creegan responded patiently to practically every query channelled to him through chairman Simon Nugent. “We understand your concerns,” he said in a tone of exhausted truth. “We’ve heard this before in several places, we can make changes to alter the impact of some proposals. We’re trying to work with you.”

Flanked by three transportation experts who sat silently throughout the meeting, their purpose as undefined as their drooping lanyards, Creegan could not dilute the vociferous objections based on personal experience. There was a demand to bin the proposals and bring on smaller, more frequent and more reliable buses, but no, all the buses in the new system would be double-decker. And so it went: the NTA was trying to offer a future, but these residents, especially those of Harbour View Road, had lived the past and, despite the calming presence of Mick Barry TD and several local councillors, they didn’t believe it.

Many homes' walls, gates and gardens  less grand than these wrought-iron wonders at Knockrea House on the Douglas Road may be in  the firing line

Like Harbour View Road to the north, the Douglas Road to the south is another pinch-point. In some parts that road will be almost doubled in width with the loss of fine gates, mature trees and beautiful old walls. Also the ceremonial gates at UCC’s entrance on the Western Road are threatened by a proposed land take from the college grounds to accommodate a new pedestrian and cycle bridge, of which there could be others throughout the city .

In a rough tot for what the old might yield to the new the totals so far are: nearly a thousand affected properties, more than twelve hundred trees (notably affecting the Boreenmanna Road) and over a thousand removed on-street parking spaces. These figures are taken from the public consultation brochures which demand close reading to grasp all elements, good and bad, of BusConnects Cork. They use the terminology of planners, architects, surveyors and engineers not common to every property concerned and have had, indeed, a connective impact already. To promoters of BusConnects it all may seem like a large row in a small city but, as poet Patrick Kavanagh noted, the Gods make their own importance. For stunned householders a patch of garden grass is as precious as the Mangala. The closing date for submissions is October 3rd next and there should be many, because, in a city not often described as vast, this is vast.