Road linking north Tipperary and Limerick an ‘accident waiting to happen’
A busy road linking north Tipperary with Limerick is “an accident waiting to happen,” according to local representatives.
At the January meeting of the Nenagh Municipal District, Labour Party councillor Fiona Bonfield raised the issue of safety on the Ballymackeogh Road, a busy artery that links the town of Newport with Limerick.
Cllr Bonfield said that safety works were needed on this road, or it would only be a matter of time before a bus full of children would end up in the ditch along there.
"I’ve raised this before, but I have to raise it again because a car went in over the ditch there over Christmas, but the Ballymackeogh Road, the R503, I know we did work there before, but another car went over the ditch there recently,” she said.
"We really need to keep this on the agenda with the Department of Transport, because it’s only a matter of time when a bus full of children is going to go in over that embankment down there, and I don’t want to have it on my conscience that I didn’t try my best with the powers that be.
"I know it’s going to cost a fortune, and we were to look at drawing up a design for it at some stage, but something really needs to be done about it, because somebody is going to get killed there,” Cllr Bonfield added.
Fianna Fáil councillor John Carroll backed Cllr Bonfield’s call, saying that he has been raising the same issue for many years.
"This road needs to be focused in on, there’s a lot of school buses there going to and from Limerick to Newport, and God forbid if an accident happened, it is low-lying land, it is subsiding all the time, and I think the highest possible priority should be put on this,” Cllr Carroll said.
In response, the roads engineer for the district said that significant challenges are posed by that road because it sits on bog land.
"The R503 is a regional road, it’s a very busy road, and it’s constructed on a bog so the foundations of the road are very, very poor. What that means in effect is that the road is moving, and it’s constantly moving,” councillors were told.
"The road undulates to some degree, it settles, we go out and we fix it, and it settles again. The problem is that it’s technically very difficult to put a solution in place, normally you’ve got good foundations in place, you could put good barriers in place, but the fact is, it’s an extremely difficult solution from an engineering point of view,” the engineer added.
"This problem is actually quite widespread in the district, it’s not just on the R503, the Athlone Road too would be a classic example where there’s a weakness on the verge,” he said.
Going forward, council engineers will continue to raise the issue with the Department of Transport to come up with a solution.