School children ‘forced to run the gauntlet’ on busy Cork city street, says principal

THE principal of a Cork city centre primary school has renewed appeals for a school traffic warden and said she fears for the safety of children crossing a busy road unaided.

Maura O’Riordan, principal of the Cork Educate Together NS on Grattan St, told The Echo that, without a school traffic warden, it might be “only a matter of time before something terrible happens”.

Ms O’Riordan said her school had repeatedly applied for a traffic warden but had been declined and was told it was due to lack of funds.

“Grattan St is an extremely busy city-centre thoroughfare... and every day we have to battle with high volumes of traffic, with children being forced to run the gauntlet to get to school,” Ms O’Riordan said.

“We have a pedestrian crossing outside the school but, by giving us the illusion of safety, it is in fact making us far more unsafe. Every day we have children getting half-way across when they are met with oncoming traffic, travelling at speed to get the lights.”

Grattan St has two one-way lanes outside the school and Ms O’Riordan said the right-hand lane tended to have a backlog of traffic, while the left-hand lane was freer-flowing.

“You have cars and large trucks straddling the pedestrian crossing, so kids have to walk around stationary cars, and they then reach the second lane and often the drivers don’t know it’s a pedestrian crossing, and those drivers are focussed on the lights at the courthouse,” she said.

“It’s a dangerous situation, and it’s happening twice a day, and something has to be done before someone is hurt or killed.”

A Cork City Council spokesperson said school warden locations in the city were selected historically and had remained unchanged.

No extra funding had been made available for school wardens in a number of years but, should additional funding become available, requests for school wardens would be assessed using pre-determined criteria such as location of crossing points, type of road, level and speed of traffic, number of children crossing, and road safety issues, the spokesperson said.