SPEAKING in the Seanad, Sinn Féin senator Joanne Collins raised concerns around active travel and safe routes in County Limerick schools.
Senator Collins told the Upper House how Dromcollogher National School raised an issue where there is no pedestrian crossing outside their school, “none of those lovely coloured crayon bollards for children to exit the school safely”.
“We are coming into the nice weather now where kids might want to be able to walk home from school or cycle. Dromcollogher National School is on a main road through Dromcollogher which is also the main road from Newcastle West to Cork,” she explained.
“If any of the trucks and lorries are going, that is the route they take. There are no speed bumps on that road so they tend to travel at quite a good speed.”
Senator Collins also pointed to the Council’s active travel funding, and what she considered an imbalance in funding between the city and county.
“Limerick city got 87 per cent of active travel funding and Limerick county got 13 per cent. Limerick county has a much bigger landmass than the city and we also would not exactly have footpaths to every single school in the county,” she hit out.
“I know my own local school has no footpath to it so it would be next to impossible for children to walk to school or even cycle to school safely.
“My issue is that you have the same population in both city and county and there is a bigger landmass in the county. I know it is probably not up to the Government to decide what way each Council distributes its funding, but I think there needs to be a little bit of fairness when it comes to the likes of active travel and safe routes to schools, so that it is not going to be better to be in school in the city than in the county.
“It is another way of pushing people and families closer to cities. If we want to look at keeping what we have in rural Ireland, we need to look at making it safe as well as the cities,” she insisted.