Filthy news on a filthy morning in the city gridlock

Date Published: {J}

Maybe it’s entirely appropriate – or just ‘a little bit spooky’ as Dame Edna might have remarked! – that any bad news about the Galway Outer Bypass invariably seems to come to me when I am out driving, or in the middle of a traffic jam.

Regular readers – and there are some such! – might recall that recently I had just driven through that new tunnel under the Shannon which has made the Cork-Limerick-Galway journey so easy, when the word came that the Galway Outer Bypass was, at very best, on the long finger.

Last week, the latest episode in this saga of ‘will it-won’t it be built’ was being played out on Galway BayFM just as I was sitting fuming in the car on the approach to the roundabout on the Tuam Road, having spent 15 minutes travelling the few hundred yards from the Briarhill Roundabout.

This is part of the selfsame stretch that just about everyone warned would become a parking lot when the new motorway was finished. Umpteen alleged experts had predicted that we would have a repeat of the kind of delays that occurred some years ago at Moyvalley when they finished a stretch of motorway and then emptied the cars onto a ‘county road’.

It follows logically that, if you channel cars down all the way from Dublin at 120 kilometres per hour, that when they arrive at a series of roundabouts on the outskirts of Galway, a city which can’t even carry ordinary traffic, then you will get gridlock.

Tuesday of last week was a ‘filthy morning’ in more ways than one! The rain was apocalyptic and the car radio, courtesy of RTE 1, was blaring out news of how we would have to spend more billions on bailing out banks . . . and close down a few more wards in hospitals. An Irish solution to an Irish problem?

The rain hammered on the windscreen, everything that was capable of moving – including a few bangers that should have been scrapped by now – was inching along the dual carriageway into the city, the place was thick with exhaust fumes, tempers were fraying, and then came the word which made it worse!

You wouldn’t have thought the atmosphere could have been made more poisonous. I had switched over to music with Jimmy Norman. He was telling drivers to use their dipped headlights it was so murky. 

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.