This article is from page 8 of the 2006-05-09 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 8 JPG
A SIX-lane motorway passing through Clare, surrounded by thousands of acres of native woodland where people can live, is the way forward, rather than “Mickey Mousing around with bypasses,” a transport expert has said.
And Transport Minister Martin Cullen has promised to try to “frontload the dual carraigeway between Limerick and Galway and I hope to make an announcement on it in the coming months.”
Professor Ed Walsh of Limerick University made the call for the construction of the highway between Limerick and Galway while addressing a business lunch organised by the Shannon and District Chamber of Commerce at which Minister Cullen was the guest speaker.
Professor Walsh said that providing a high-speed corridor between the two cities and having the two come together to create an “Atlantic counterpole” as a counter-balance to Dublin.
He cited the example of the US State of North Carolina which “offers a fine example of how a neglected region moved from the fringes, prospered and became a remarkable model for knowledge-age development.
The prospects for North Carolina were bleak, as cotton and tobacco farming went into decline, until the State Governor, Luther Hodges moved to bring together three universities to form the Research Triangle Park.
The associated cities of Raleigh and Durham grew together with the Raleigh-Durham airport as the transport hub at the core.
This partnership of universities and cities has acted as a catalyst for investment in North Carolina and transformed a once-poor State into a prosperous and progressive one.
“A similar opportunity and challenge presents itself to the cities of Galway and Limerick, to their universities and to Shannon Airport at the core of the interurban corridor,” the professor said.
The professor said that the motorway “would significantly improve the prospects for Shannon and for the creation of the Atlantic Cities counterpole.
“The energies of the Mid-West and West regions should be directed towards ensuring that the current defective plans are upgraded and a Motorway to normal EU standard is built between Galway and Limerick.
“Provision should be made for eventually upgrading this to six lanes, anticipating the development of the Atlantic Cities counterpole.”
In his address Minister Cullen said that he believes that having Galway and Limerick come together is the right thing to do.
“On their own, none of the cities can be a counterbalance to Dublin,” he said, adding that the Government is ‘Mickey Mousing about with bypasses’.
“We’re spending ten million per day of taxpayers’ money – the difficulty for me is that everybody wants their road first.”