THE CHIEF executive of the National Roads Authority (NRA), Fred Barry, and Meath county manager Tom Dowling are to be called before an Oireachtas committee to explain delays in building a bypass for "Ireland's blackest blackspot", the village of Slane, in north Meath., writes TIM O'BRIEN
The move follows a chilling account given by a motorist involved in the most recent multiple-vehicle crash in Slane – involving two lorries and seven cars – to the Oireachtas Committee on Transport last week.
Norma Kealy said she was one of a group of mothers who had just dropped off children at the local national school on the morning of March 23rd last. “We were driving south,” she recalled. “My three-year-old son was in the back of the car and one of the other mothers had a 19-month-old baby with her.”
She told members she recalled being stopped at traffic lights in the village and hearing a loud bang. Looking in the mirror, she saw an articulated lorry careering towards her, knocking other cars out of the way.
“We knew immediately we were going to be hit but there was nothing we could do, and for the majority there was no way of escape on this confined section of roadway.”
Ms Kealy told members it was a great surprise, given the mangled and upturned cars that lay around the street after the crash, that nobody had been killed. She said there were 22 white crosses on a nearby wall to mark the 22 people who have died in vehicle crashes in the village in recent years.
She said that she still suffers trauma when she drives the same route every day, and thinks: “There could have been two more crosses there, one for me and one for my son.
“If the pile-up was 10 minutes earlier when the children were going into school, the consequences would have been catastrophic,” she said.
Meath East TD Shane McEntee, Fine Gael party spokesman on road safety, said that Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey should also be asked to explain the delay in building a bypass for the village which, the committee was told, is in the top 1 per cent of the country’s worst accident blackspots.
“The pressure must continue on up to the Minister, Deputy Dempsey. We should meet him again, because the NRA is a law unto itself. We must bring the NRA before us and make it responsible to the people for road safety.”
Mr McEntee revealed that one of those killed in a car crash in Slane had been a close schoolfriend. “He was killed with his girlfriend when his car went on fire in a crash. I sat beside him [in school] for three years,” he recalled.
He knew residents of Slane were prepared to go to jail on the issue of the provision of a bypass, he added, declaring that “I will be there with them”.
Labour Senator Dominic Hannigan said Slane had been recognised as a blackspot since his father was a member of the Garda Síochána there in the 1950s, while acting chairman of the committee Paul Conn-aughton said it was “the blackest of blackspots”.
John Ryle of the Slane Bridge Action Group said the village was the point of intersection between the N2 and the N51, and the volume of heavier vehicles, which he had recorded, had reached 139 lorries and 156 vans in one 53-minute interval. “It has to be seen to be believed,” he said, adding that he did not count cars “as there were too many”.
The committee agreed to call the manager of Meath County Council and the chief executive of the NRA to explain delays in building a bypass for the village.