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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
6 0 October 2016
A
round one hundred submissions were
recieved by Galway's City Council on
its Draft Development Plan 2017-23
by the deadline of 5 October.
Meanwhile, a number of well-
known community and environmental activists
in Galway City have come together to form a new
alliance to promote a ‘Future Cities’ concept
based on "regenerative urban development,
‘green’ living, smart technologies and a sustain-
able transport. They have a lot on their plate. It’s
a planning and transportation mess with no
visionary Messiah.
In many small cities comparable in size to
Galway, people are regenerating and humanis-
ing their urban environments by introducing
woodlands, gardens, recreational parks and
city-wide 24/7 cycling, walking and public bus
or train systems.
Yet here in Galway City we are now proposing
to build the N6 ringroad that will cut through
homes, villages, neighbourhoods, farmland, key
wildlife habitats, a university campus and sports
fields, and lead to further mindless urban sprawl
of this, in so many ways, creative city.
Then, having spent €700m on a new road,
there will be no incentive or money left to intro-
duce the Public Transport improvements being
promised “after the road is built”. If Galway City
is to have a sustainable future, the authorities
should immediately bin a policy based on a dis-
credited ‘predict and provide’ private car-based
transportation model and instead should use the
available €500-750m to construct a hierarchical
transport model based on a ‘new mobility’ pri
-
oritising pedestrians, cyclists and users of
public transport”.
When the IDA first developed its business
parks at Parkmore in the early 1970s there were
very few businesses initially established out that
far. So having only one main entrance avenue
wasn’t a problem. In the intervening years the
estate has exploded so it now accommodates
many of the world’s leading medical device and
IT manufacturers. With very little available
public transport passing, let alone actually
entering the estate: the sheer number of private
cars coming in has now reached crisis point.
Yet Galway Co Council actually gave permis
-
sion for a new sub-standard entrance/exit point
and junction giving the planning board no choice
but to refuse permission. In September An Bord
Pleanála duly reversed the permission because
"its construction would endanger public safety
by reason of traffic hazard”. This decision could,
should, force debate about the much larger can
of worms around Ireland’s lack of a ‘sustainable’
National Spatial Strategy’.
The daily traffic chaos in Parkmore is a symp
-
tom of the much wider problem we have in
historic spatial planning in Galway, with rapidly
increasing numbers of people having to com-
mute from their new homes in County Galway to
their workplace in the city, by car.
This phenomenon has become overwhelming
over the past 40 years. Workers living in the city
but working in Parkmore/Ballybrit have been
failed by the lack of civic imagination that might
have provided an adequate public transport
system in the city. For a youthful and fashionable
city, capital of ‘craic’, dubbed as progressive,
and once crowned ‘the fastest growing city in
Europe’ this is anachronistic.
In its May 2014 Newsletter, the Western Devel
-
opment Commission - using an IDA case-study,
stated that “of the 16,701 rural dwellers commut-
ing to work within the gateway of Galway city,
one quarter (25.6% or 4,285) commute to work
in the IDA estates”.
The first figure refers not just to people head
-
ing in to Ballybrit, Parkmore and Galway
Technology Parks, but others who commute fur-
ther still into the heart of Galway city, for work
at GMIT, NUIG and UCHG, our largest city-centre
employment nodes.
As James Wickham said in his book ‘Gridlock’:
“Car dependency is an issue for social policy.
Car dependency exacerbates social exclusion,
for those who do not have a car run the risk of
being excluded from normal life. Their access to
jobs is restricted, they find it difficult to move
around the city, they are not full citizens”.
There is a belief that transportation problems
result from the antedeluvian planning policies of
the 1980s and 1990s, both at local and national
level. These intensified in Galway from the time
Colin Buchanan and Partners published its
‘Galway Transportation and Planning Study’ in
September 1999. This report together with its
subsequent 2002 ‘Integration Study’ commis
-
sioned jointly by Galway City and County
Councils, led to a situation in Galway, not dis
-
similar to that of Dublin, where availability of
sufficient reasonably priced housing units in the
city failed to keep up with growing public
demand.
This, combined during the madness of the
Celtic Tiger years, with pressure being applied
by county councillors and developers turned Gal-
way’s surrounding towns, villages and
particularly countryside into worker dormitories:
for families that had been priced out of continu-
ing to live in Galway city.
The Galway County Development Plan of
2002, which integrated the recommendations
from the Buchanan Report, facilitated
galway
Sprawlway
The proposed ringroad and continuing prevalence
of one-off housing applications symptomise
historical planning anarchy and the derivative
current planning stasis in Galway City and County
by Derek hambleton
ENvIRONMENT
The highway will cut
through homes, villages,
neighbourhoods, farmland,
key wildlife habitats, a
university campus and
sports fields, and facilitate
sprawl of this creative city
October 2016 6 1
development in places ringed around the city:
Bearna, Moycullen, Claregalway, Tuam, Oran-
more and Athenry. And everything in between.
Responding to Galway County Council’s then
-
Draft Development Plan in July 2002, then City
Manager John Tierney wrote to Donal
O’Donoghue, then County Manager, expressing
some concern over proposed policies which
would continue to promote a wider spread of set-
tlement, and not the concentration into the 38
towns, villages and proposed development at
Ardaun that had been planned.
He stated: “The cumulative effect of these
policies/objectives all greatly undermines the
‘Galway Transport and Planning Study’ GTPS,
any sustainable approach to a settlement struc-
ture and consequently any ability to promote a
sustainable public transport system. It would
exacerbate the current dependence on pri
-
vate vehicular transport and the consequent
negative effects of this”.
Tierney’s pleas went ignored, and widespread
‘one off’ housing development in County Galway
continued unabated, with septic tanks mush-
rooming leading to water pollution,
cryptosporidium, and a culture of lengthy com-
mutes into once homely Galway City.
So a long-term strategic policy for planning
where people might be sustainably housed was
scupperedd, due to the regime, the report and
thousands of concomitant individual acts of
planning anarchy, cumulatively undermining any
regional strategy.
The problem is now self-pepetuating and solu-
tion-less. Acting County CEO Kevin Kelly recently
told an audience gathered in the Meyrick Hotel
ballroom in the city in late September to hear
housing minister Simon Coveney, announce his
latest ‘Action Plan for Housing and Homeless-
ness’ that: “Of all the numbers of new houses
built in the county last year 50% were grants for
‘one-offs’. It should be no surprise therefore to
note that without consequent development of
additional public transport services to these
locations -an impossible task - many more work-
ers living in county areas will have to continue to
travel to work by car”.
The President of the Irish Planning Institute
Deirdre Fallon, made the following submission
before the formation of the new government ear-
lier this year: “The next Government must take
rural issues seriously, particularly by committing
to a new approach to rural development and one-
off rural housing. We welcome all parties’
commitments to renewing and investing in our
towns and villages but this is pointless unless
strong, reasonable and viable alternatives to the
construction of one-off rural housing are put in
place and the Rural Housing Guidelines for Plan-
ning Authorities 2005 are reviewed to ensure
rural Ireland is protected as an asset, not just
used as a sprawling commuter belt”.
Building the proposed new bypass around
Galway will only add to and intensify urban-
sprawl - pushing urban development around
Galway City ever further out into the
countryside.
The ‘Galway Transport Strategy’ was drawn
up to address the severe build-up of traffic con-
gestion in Galway City, outside of school holiday
times, and to promote future growth in periph-
eral development areas with more housing and
industry.
Officials in Galway now characteristically com-
plain that there is a lack of residential housing
density to justify building a city-wide Light Rail
Tram system. Councillors twice voted for cost-
benefit analysis as long ago as 2010!
Yet planners do nothing to encourage and pro-
vide for increased urban density, which would
include development of the high-quality apart-
ment developments residents in other European
cities take for granted. Even in Dublin the move
towards developing more intense city centre
apartment schemes is powering ahead. This
policy is surely making the Luas an even more
sustainable choice.
In Galway our authorities, together with Trans-
port Infrastructure Ireland (TII) want to spend
over a billion euro in construction of an N6 Ring
Road, that will pass through some of Galway’s
greenest suburbs, and in developing their
Galway City Transportation Plan.
Alternative transport options will have to be
pursued at an An Bord Pleanála hearing towards
the end of this year. With authorities having
ignored all efforts from people opposed to their
damaging plans, it is the only opportunity many
people will have to help arrest the tentacles of
overwhelming sprawl and follow better, stand
-
ard European models that promote a better and
more sustainable quality of life.
Derrick Hambleton is chairman of An Taisce’s
Galway Association and Galway City Commu
-
nity Networks representative on Galway City’s
Transport and Planning SPC
50% of housing permisssions
in Galway last year were
for ‘one-offs’. Now, without
development of additional
public transport services
to these locations - an
impossible task - many more
workers living in county areas
will have to continue to travel
to work by car
