Residents meet on Bish move
Dangan residents will meet next Monday to gauge whether they should reinvigorate their campaign of opposition to a proposal to move ‘the Bish’ secondary school to a site in NUIG.
The residents successfully lobbied enough councillors to block a specific objective to be included in the last Galway City Development Plan supporting the development of a secondary school on university land.
The move fell in 2005 by the casting vote of the then mayor Councillor Catherine Connolly, with accusations that she should have excused herself from the vote as her husband worked in the school.
The meeting has been organised to test the reaction to a vote last November by councillors to allow the building of a secondary school on a 1.6 hectare site between the hockey pitch and the N59 Moycullen Road opposite Dangan Heights in the next development plan until 2023 currently being drawn up.
A resident involved in the last campaign said he believed the depth of feeling against a secondary school in the area remained.
“Traffic would be one of the major concerns, the other concern is about 800 kids roaming Dangan every day without supervision. We don’t believe they’d have shared facilities with the college, the college is losing three pitches, the Connacht Regional Sports Centre is independently run – you put them in Dangan what do they do?” he asked.
Many residents believed St Joseph’s College – known as ‘the Bish’ – was being hoodwinked by NUIG, which could take over the prime site in Nuns Island and turn it into student accommodation for non-EU students who pay many thousands to get an education in Ireland. NUIG are limited in their ability to attract these lucrative fee-paying students due to the lack of city centre housing.
“The site on NUIG is very small for a school of this size. Really, any new secondary school should be built on the other side of the city or in Moycullen where there’s a big demand.”
For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.