INDEPENDENT Ireland councillor John O’Donoghue took aim at former Green Party TD Brian Leddin after his return to the Limerick Council chamber as a Public Partnership Network (PPN) member.
Mr Leddin was elected to Dáil Éireann in February 2020 and became the first Green Party TD to represent Limerick City, but did not retain his seat in the last election. Prior to his elevation to the Dáil, he was a Green Party councillor representing Limerick North City.
Last week, Leddin, who resigned from the Greens last October, returned to the Limerick Council chamber in Dooradoyle as a PPN member of the Economic Development, Enterprise, Tourism, and Planning Strategic Policy Committee (SPC).
During an update on the Clarina Ballybrown Public Realm Enhancement Plan at last Monday’s SPC, Cllr O’Donoghue took the view that, when planning Active Travel schemes, Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) must be cognisant of the fact that agricultural machinery, busses, and trucks have all gotten larger.
“These are shared spaces in an open area, but inside a predominantly rural environment, and that’s the one thing when you are narrowing downward spaces like that. They have to be narrowed down for certain reasons, but TII rules generally state this comes down to six meters. It won’t really work in a lot of places, especially when you’re going to want to come within a rural environment, because machinery, busses, trucks, tractors, everything have gotten larger,” he told SPC members.
In response, Mr Leddin suggested that this predicament now left a fundamental question to be answered:
“Do we keep widening the roads because the manufacturers of these vehicles continuously bring out bigger and wider vehicles? I think we just need to be careful that we’re not all the time yielding, pardon the pun, to these manufacturers. The tendency obviously is when you have a wider road, cars will go faster and there’s a safety impact. I take Cllr O’Donoghue’s point, but I don’t think we should necessarily be making roads as wide as possible to facilitate wide as possible vehicles that might drive down them.”
At the following morning’s Adare-Rathkeale district meeting, Cllr O’Donoghue criticised Leddin for his remark.
“A former TD actually came back and said we should be narrowing down the road, we should be designing smaller agricultural machinery. This was the feedback,” he said.