Galway – Beware Highwaymen

Galway should be ashamed of itself, or rather its City Council should be. Take a bow recently retired long-term chief executive Brendan McGrath. This collective of nincompoops has been presiding over the most snarled up, traffic-jammed city in Western Europe for as long as I can remember. Those who listen to the morning and evening traffic reports on RTE are familiar with the daily Bothar na dTreabh debacle. We always felt it had the worst traffic management system in the country but a recent EEC study has confirmed that it’s actually the worst in Western Europe. You’d have to go to Seoul in South Korea to encounter the like.  A Galway bypass is regularly proposed and regularly opposed - so some blame must also attach to our idle government who should have stepped in and sorted out access to a city that is central to our tourist industry. Meanwhile the people living there waste time and psychic energy languishing in their stationery cars – belching out pollutants the while. And it’s not just the locals – Galway is the main gateway to Connemara so many of those travelling to Clifden and Roundstone must pass through it. (As I do frequently.) If you’re travelling from Dublin to Connemara I’d recommend turning right at Athlone – taking the Westport road and avoiding the whole mess altogether. Even though it’s a longer journey (unless maybe you’re going to Leenaun).

 

But inept as they are at dealing with Galway’s traffic problems, the City Council has a  wonderful revenue gathering racket going on that makes you wonder if its tardiness in sorting out the traffic issue is deliberate. If it were to make life easier for motorists, it could jeopardise this lucrative scam  – its extortion racket on the N6. This road is a dual-carriageway on the eastern outskirts of Galway that takes you to freedom from the slough of despond of its accumulated traffic and onwards to the M6. The speed-limit on this capacious, non-residential road is a ludicrous 50 km/hr - that’s very close to 30 miles an hour. The cunning burgers running this shit-show of a snarled-up city have stationed a speed-trap at the very point where motorists having escaped the clutches of the inexorable traffic jams see the open road ahead and crank it up to 60 or 70 km/hr – that’s just over 40 mph. But beware, this light at the end of the Galway tunnel is a lure to line the pockets of the incompetent pricks that run the city. A bonus for incompetence. For you are entering a section of the N6 at Baile an Phoill that has levied the most fines for speeding in the country last year – by a country mile. A total of 326,240 fixed cost penalties – that’s a fine of €160 and three points on your licence. There are moves afoot to thwart this scam by raising the speed limit but no action has been taken yet.

 

In the meantime I’d just avoid the city. Galway always seems to get a good press: the place to go, the craic is mighty, the cosmopolitan crowd, a musical Mecca and so on. I’m not so sure. From my experience in recent years there are only three good reasons to go near the place: one is its location as the gateway to glorious Connemara, its annual Arts Festival and Charlie Byrne’s bookshop where you can encounter those obscure and interesting books that the accountants tell other bookshops not to bother stocking. (On my last trip I got a copy of John Rechy’s selected essays. Rechy was a brave pioneer of gay literature in America in the Sixties with his classic City of Night).  Otherwise the city centre is a Disneyland of Paddywhackery with not one but two Carroll’s shops shamelessly doing brisk business in leprechaun hats and red beards. But I’m not here to bury Galway but to heap opprobrium on the inept clowns that run the city – and specifically those who mismanage the road system. Perhaps the new (interim?) Chief Executive Ms. Patricia Philbin can deliver us from this evil.