Gardai said Louth County Council should man Xerox junction after traffic light outage

By Olivia Ryan, The Drogheda Independent

Louth County Council appealed to gardai to carry out point duty when a “very dangerous” outage at the Xerox junction in Dundalk caused “absolute chaos” last week.

But gardai had informed the council that they should be manning the junction, members of Dundalk Municipal District heard.

Cllr. Maeve Yore said she had been at the junction when the lights went out, and described it as “absolute chaos.”

“It is an accident waiting to happen when lights go out, can we expedite traffic light upgrades at major junctions?”

Cllr. Kevin Meenan said it was a “very dangerous” situation for anyone coming up to the junction last week, and asked if gardai could carry out point duty when an outage is reported.

He said it had been raised at meetings of the former Joint Policing Committees, and gardai had indicated they would be open to going on point duty if there was an outage at a major junction like this.

"It is just way too dangerous, you are taking your life in your hands when the lights are out up there. We need to reach out to gardai.”

Cllr. Shane McGuinness asked if this was a planned outage, or if it was a fault.

"There was a bit of mixed messaging around this,” he added.

Senior Executive Engineer, Paddy Callan, told councillors it was an ESB outage, which was reported as a planned outage, but the council were not aware it was happening.

He said they were “going to chase the ESB on this” as notifications don’t always alert the local authority that traffic lights will be out at specific junctions.

There were also some issues at the Gateway Hotel junction, where timing sequences had been affected by works being carried out in the area, but he understood these had been resolved.

The council engineer said he had asked gardai if they could go out to the junction when the traffic lights were out, but was told the council should be carrying out point duty.

"We don't have the facilities to man a junction that size, I explained that to them.”

He understood that gardai would have gone out to man the junction if the outage continued after nightfall.

"It is something we would request again if a similar situation occurs,” said Mr. Callan.

Cllr. Emma Coffey raised concerns about the timing of traffic lights at the Gateway Hotel junction.

“I was there this morning, it still isn’t sorted out. The road isn’t open at the moment, but when it is open traffic is flowing through, so it is causing a serious backlog.”

She also highlighted an outage at brand new traffic lights on the Castleblayney Road earlier in the week which had caused significant challenges for parents trying to get children to school in the area.

"It’s great we are getting upgrades, but if there are teething problems could we be told about it?” asked Cllr. Coffey.