“The A5 in its current construct is a grim reaper, time its only constraint,” said Plunkett Nugent, acting barrister for the Enough Is Enough campaign, in his opening remarks at this week’s public inquiry into the ongoing planning saga of the A5 road that runs from Aughnacloy, Co Tyrone to Derry. The upgrade to dual carriageway status was approved in July 2007, with joint funding from Stormont and the Irish government. Since then, it has become mired in objections and court appeals. Nothing has changed except for the number of fatalities.
“Further delay,” Nugent warned, “will only provide more opportunity for the most dangerous road imaginable to devastate other families and communities. It has not, does not, and will not discriminate.”
It was a sombre note in what remains a hugely emotive issue for the communities whose lives are framed by the necessity of using a 58-mile stretch of road which has, since 2007, claimed 47 lives.
The A5 is a snaking ribbon of a road running through the heart of rural Tyrone. Its major starting junction, as you travel north, is the Ballygawley roundabout, which has become a sort of unofficial landmark for Errigal Ciaran country, probably the most famous of the Tyrone GAA clubs.
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The road’s original construction, in the 1950s and 1960s, made it perfectly suited for the limited, meandering local and agricultural traffic of that time. Now, the same surface is required to act as the main artery connecting northwest Donegal with Dublin while also absorbing local traffic, heavy goods vehicles, tractors, and people whose homes are in the densely latticework of country lanes and entrances which filter off the main road.
“There are some bypasses built in the 1990s around Omagh and Strabane and Newtownstewart in the 2000s,” says Wesley Johnston, who curates a website called Northern Ireland Roads Site. “But apart from that, it is single carriageway the entire distance. It attracts an enormous amount of traffic because it is one of the only north-south routes west of Lough Neagh.
“I grew up in Omagh and in the 20 years since I left, it has become a heck of a lot busier. Overtaking lanes have been provided on a few stretches. But it is not like the ones you get south of the Border with a barrier. The design standards are such that regulations can’t allow you to build those with lots of side roads. You would end up with people turning out into three lanes of traffic. Every hundred yards there are field entrances and entrances to houses. It really has a dense number of side roads. And it runs through an agricultural area with livestock rearing and a lot of small fields.”
It has, in short, become a nightmare for motorists.
By curious coincidence, the Donegal Fine Gael TD Joe McHugh was travelling on the A5 when he took a phone call – hands free – from The Irish Times on Wednesday afternoon.
“I’m driving this road the best part of 30 years,” he said. “And I am no different to Inishowen van drivers going up and down to plaster and build. To say it’s drudgery is an understatement.
“Even now I am behind a lorry driving at 50km/h an hour. I have just come out of a queue in Omagh with two ambulances in traffic and the cars ahead couldn’t see they were waiting to get through. You are dealing with a lot of frustration on the road, and you see people overtaking where they shouldn’t. It is not an easy journey.”
In October last year, John Rafferty (21), an exceptional Gaelic footballer from Killyclogher and a member of the Tyrone Under-20 team, lost his life on the A5 near Beragh following a collision between a car and a tractor. Niall McKenna, the Tyrone county treasurer, is from Killyclogher and won’t forget the numbness in the community over the days of the funeral.
Tyrone club enmity is fierce but all of that was set aside that weekend. As it happened, the regular county board meeting took place the following Tuesday. McKenna intended to thank the delegates from the various clubs for their support of the Rafferty family and friends. Looking out across the room, he saw another delegate, Damian Corrigan, whose son had died after an incident on the A5 the previous Christmas. A woman sitting to his left, he knew, had lost a family member two years previous. He had met the Tyrone Under-21 assistant manager in the building earlier that evening: his mother had been knocked down at the bottom of the road near her house.
“So, we were talking among ourselves and said: look, this road is out of control. It is quite literally killing our members. That is only a small gathering of people. So, we had a duty to protect our members. The Garvaghey centre [the Tyrone GAA training facility] is at a junction on one of the worst parts of the road.”
That conversation led to the formation of the A5 Enough Is Enough campaign in the Tyrone GAA Centre. The launch took place on a Monday evening, January 23rd. The crowd exceeded the room capacity; the event was streamed into other rooms as harrowing stories were told by local people whose lives have been scarred. Kate Corrigan told of the night her son Nathan was killed in an incident just 100 yards from the family home. Peter Canavan, the former Tyrone All-Ireland medal winner, recalled a Friday in November in 1979 in Glencull.
The local primary school had two dinner ladies, “Big Annie” and “Wee Annie”, both of whom were adored by the pupils. Shortly after leaving the school, walking either to the chapel or Canavan’s post office, one of the women was struck by a car and trailer that left the road and was killed. The schoolchildren had to walk past the scene on their way home. It stayed with them. “The trauma for us, as children, was minor compared to what her family went through,” Canavan said in a powerful address.
At a public meeting of the Enough campaign last week, a three-car collision caused several people to be late.
“The next day there was another bad incident between Omagh and Newtownstewart,” says Niall McKenna.
“And the day after that another north of Omagh. They are not even newsworthy any more. But these accidents can leave people with life-changing injuries. We have also tried to get statistics on injuries and fatalities prior to 2007. And there is an impact on the first responder. I was talking with a retired fireman and every time he drives that road, he has horrific images of the things he encountered. We are very passive in life, and we can assume that the apparatus of civil life will deliver these things. But unfortunately, because of the destructive way of a lot of public life up here, this scheme has been continuously thwarted.”
The announcement of a Dublin-Donegal motorway was one of the jewels in the crown of the 2006 St Andrew’s Agreement; an ambitious cross-Border government venture with equal funding for the estimated £800 million dual-carriageway. The Northern Ireland Executive agreed to proceed with the plan in July 2007. In February 2009, the preferred route options were displayed to the public. In 2011, the first public inquiry was held. That November, the Irish Government, in a radically different economic climate now, withdrew its funding offer. By September 2012, the scheme was put on hold following legal challenges.
A Belfast Telegraph opinion piece from 2012, written by the late Henry McDonald, read the political nuances like this: “Where once it was a ballot box and an Armalite, Sinn Féin’s dream of a united Ireland would not come about with a jackhammer in one hand and JCB control box on the other. Predictably, unionists got spooked over the implications of the project, which would be co-funded by the then Fianna-Fáil led government.”
During those delays, a group of people formed the Alternative A5 Alliance (AA5A). An iteration of the scheme was given the go-ahead by Department for Regional Development minister Danny Kennedy in July 2012; it was halted following a legal challenge by AA5A. John Dunbar, the chairman of the AA5A at the time said: “Human rights are at stake here and the livelihoods of 400 farmers and landowners is at stake, so we’ve every right to try to defend what we think is an justifiable scheme.”
In the decade since, the scheme has been bogged down in a dismaying cycle of legal objection and stalemate. The volume of traffic has become heavier. The AA5A group has, to its frustration, been portrayed as a shadowy group of landowners who refuse to engage and are indifferent to dangers of the road.
Although they have been legally advised not to give interviews during this latest public inquiry, a spokesperson told The Irish Times that they feel that such representation is mischievous. They make the point that they, too, are road users and as parents and grandparents share the same concerns as everybody about the A5. They are in full agreement that the road is not fit for purpose and have proposed what they see as a viable alternative – a series of upgrades.
They have a fundamental objection to the estimated cost of a dualling system, which now sits at £1.6 billion, a staggering figure for what they regard as a “monstrosity of a scheme”. There is a belief that the road has become a political vanity project.
The group’s statement, released ahead of the Inquiry, reads: “The Alternative A5 Alliance opposes this scheme and contends that it is overprovision and that there are more proportionate alternatives to the proposed new offline carriageway, and these should have been fully appraised and costed. As residents of County Tyrone, our supporters are acutely conscious of the road safety and regional economic issues involved. The improvement and upgrade of the existing A5 has long been needed and the Alternative A5 Alliance has consistently proposed how this might be done to secure road safety or other benefits in a proportionate and effective way.”
Affordability is a problem. £1.6 billion? We don’t have anything close to that. We are talking about not gritting the roads this winter because of the money we need to save
— Wesley Johnston
A note for context states that almost all the AA5A supporters “live along the route of the A5 and use it on a daily basis”.
Meanwhile, at the inquiry this week, people who had lost loved ones sat listening to exchanges which were highly technical in nature.
“For example, this morning the inquiry got a bit raucous because we are going into the minutiae of how to protect bats or red squirrels or badgers,” said Niall McKenna, speaking during a lunch break on Tuesday.
“And you are looking around at members who have lost their son or daughter in the last year or two. There is no perspective. We are talking about the protection of human life on the most dangerous road in Ireland. And you hear talking about habitats and ecology. And that is not to diminish those issues. But there needs to be perspective.”
It’s an apt word. The time span, for the relatively straightforward task of improving a road, has been mind-boggling. Equally, the sums of money involved are vast. The Irish Government has presently committed the revised sum of £75 million, a figure arrived at under the 2014 Stormont House Agreement and Implementation Plan. A spokesperson from the Department of Transport told The Irish Times this week that “in terms of how much the Irish government has spent on the A5 upgrade to date, £22 million was paid in three tranches over the period 2009 to 2012″, fulfilling the Government’s funding commitment under the original expenditure profile. During Leaders’ Questions in the Dáil last week, the Minister for Finance Michael McGrath, responding to questions from Sinn Féin Donegal TD Pearse Doherty, indicated a willingness towards flexibility on the A5 works.
“Once we have a project that has gone through all the statutory processes, we know the scope of the project, we know the likely cost of the project, the Irish government won’t be found wanting. We will sit down and engage in the spirit of co-operation, recognising the strategic importance of this road,” McGrath said.
But there is still no clarity on what happens next. Wesley Johnston describes the idea of the transformation of the A5 into a dual carriageway as a “gold-plated solution”.
“Affordability is a problem. £1.6 billion [€1.8 billion]? We don’t have anything close to that. We are talking about not gritting the roads this winter because of the money we need to save.”
Delay will only deliver more deaths, more heartbreak, more families and communities torn apart
— Plunkett Nugent
Although the AA5A group may not have excelled in its public relations to date, Johnston does feel its members have “an understandable grievance”. But he can see difficulties, too, with their upgrade proposals as well. Some sort of compromise – a curated series of improvements involving partial dual-carriageway, roundabouts at dangerous junctions, improved street lighting, reduced speed limits and a bypass to rid the bottlenecks which habitually delay northwest-bound motorists at Omagh and Strabane – might alleviate the worst of it.
Joe McHugh is optimistic that the latest Public Inquiry will mark the beginning of a new phase of urgency.
“I don’t think there is any justification for any slacking in terms of political pressure. And I don’t buy into the idea that it will require Stormont to be up and going. This is such a significant project that if it requires a London intervention, so be it. I know that the commitment is there from [an Irish] Government point of view. And whatever money needs to be put on the table, it must be done. And it is not just the A5. There is a business case now being presented by Donegal County Council for the Lifford-Letterkenny section. There is no point in doing that later: as far I as I’m concerned it is part of the bigger plan.”
Over 10,000 people have signed the Enough Is Enough petition and those behind the movement feel it is gathering momentum. At the January launch, Kevin Hughes, another former All-Ireland medal winner with Tyrone, gave an unbearably moving testimony about the accidents that ended the lives of two of his siblings. Hughes was a teenager when his older brother Paul was killed on the A4 road, which runs from Ballygawley to Dungannon, in August 1997. Kevin Hughes was in traffic on the same road when his brother’s incident occurred, heading to football training: he took the back roads not realising why there was such a backup on the A5. In 2001, his sister Helen lost her life in an incident close to the same spot: a vehicle reversed from a side lane. Hughes was visibly emotional as he called for an end to the “silly politics” which has prevented work starting on the A5.
The A4 was for many years a notorious accident black spot also. It was approved for an upgrade dual carriageway status at the same time as the A5 and the work was carried out successfully. Since then, there has been a 97 per cent reduction in road fatalities.
This, for the Enough campaign, is irrefutable evidence of why work needs to begin on a scheme on the A5 Western Transport Corridor dual carriageway. The most recent tragedy occurred as recently as April 27th. Christine Duffy, her brother Dan McKane, and their aunt Julia McSorley, all from Strabane, died in an incident which occurred at around 7.20am.
“Delay,” Plunkett Nugent told those attending the Inquiry, “will only deliver more deaths, more heartbreak, more families and communities torn apart.”
