Residents, politicians and members of the business community in Deansgrange have sharply criticised a €12.5 million roadworks scheme which they said has brought the south Dublin suburb to a halt for the second time in as many years.
At a public meeting in Bakers Corner on Thursday night, representatives of Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council and its contractor Clonmel Enterprises were repeatedly heckled as they sought to outline the works schedule for the two-year project.
Opening the meeting, William Winters, resident engineer in the council’s active travel section, said the scheme – Phase One of the Dún Laoghaire Central Active Travel Scheme – having gone through public consultation and a vote by councillors was “now an approved scheme, so this meeting is about the construction stage”.
However, Mr Winters was roundly heckled and a number of people questioned the design including closure of left hand slipways at junctions, the cost of the project, the method of public consultation and traffic light sequencing at Bakers Corner which they claimed allowed just three cars per direction, through the junction at a time.
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A number of speakers said congestion had built up extensively in surrounding suburbs and people could not drive out of their housing estates while some vehicles were rat-running. Many speakers complained of poor signage, a lack of yellow boxes on the roads, safety measures for children and the elderly and the absence of night-time and weekend working on the project.
Niall McElwaine, a director of Clonmel Enterprises which is carrying out the construction work, told the meeting the company had a job to do and was carrying it out in a structured way. “In terms of you not wanting it – we are only the contractors here,” he said.
Earlier, local businesses told The Irish Times they were particularly aggrieved about the road works, which involve redesigning junctions over a wide area between Bakers Corner and Killiney, follow almost two years of disruption on Deansgrange Road.
Rachel Twomey general manager of SuperValu which employs 100 full- and part-time staff told The Irish Times most people understood the imperative for active travel measures. But she accused the council of failing to understand the community it was serving.
“They can say people should do their big shop somewhere else like Cornelscourt or Blackrock and just crush us. But they have not considered families taking children to sports in other communities after school. These communities around south Dublin are interconnected. They go one place for hockey, another for swimming and another for tennis, somewhere else for GAA and football,” she said.
In relation to the impact on her business, she said “the big shop is gone, gone gone”.
Declan Fitzgerald of Nexus Accounting on Deansgrange Road said his firm owned the building which featured a number of retail units at ground floor. He said one of these, a flower shop, had handed back the keys due to business disruption, while he himself was still in talks to the council over compensation for land taken fronting Deansgrange Road. He said businesses in the area were extremely frustrated.
Tom Kelly who runs Graft Coffee in the Deansgrange Business park said he had not counted the loss of custom to his business but trade was visibly down. He said it regularly takes 30 minutes and more to travel the last 800 metres to his coffee shop, since changes were put in place. “People avoid Deansgrange,” he said.
Local Fine Gael councillor Maurice Dockrell also cited the closure of the flower shop which he said was due to “the prolonged roadworks, combined with ongoing building works [which] have made traffic conditions unbearable.
