Local Elections 2024: Parking and housing now big issues in Macroom following bypass success

THE local elections, which will take place on June 7, couldn’t come at a better time for the sitting councillors of Macroom Municipal District.

The townspeople of Macroom are living their best lives at the moment; the air they breathe is cleaner, and shops and café are busier due to more people driving to town to stop and spend time there.

And this is all thanks to the long-awaited bypass of the town which opened just before Christmas 2022 and has proved to be a lifeline for the town and its hinterland.

Against this positive backdrop, the forthcoming poll will still be precarious for sitting councillors.

As welcome as the €300m Macroom and Baile Mhúirne bypass has been in the town, it’s also led to a shift in focus to other issues that were in the background but are now coming to the fore.

Parking - or the lack of it - is becoming a far more pressing problem in Macroom.

As local businessman JP Quinlan, the owner of Quinlan’s Gift Shop on New Street, puts it, before the bypass was in place people would drive through Macroom with a sinking feeling knowing they would be stuck in traffic for ages before emerging to resume their journey.

His business is shortly to be re-opened as the transformed Vanguard Art Gallery.

“Before the bypass was there, anybody driving through Macroom, the first thing they wanted to do was drive through Macroom and get to the other side of the town,” he said.

“Now that the bypass is there, there’s a huge reduction in the passing through of traffic so the people from the hinterland are coming into the town and there’s a lot of small businesses whose trade has increased since the bypass.

“People coming into Macroom can walk around, there’s no traffic congestion, they can move a lot freer but the problem is those people want to park their cars.

“For instance a bank manager in Macroom was telling me that the use of the ATM machine there has really increased and you can see it in the local coffee shops that they’re busier and that’s because the local people from the hinterland are coming in and saying, you know what we will do, we will go for a coffee.”

The businessman, who restored an almost derelict building on Castle Street and turned it into an award-winning pub back in the late 80s, is particularly vocal about the blight of dereliction.

Another local businessman, undertaker Martin Fitzgerald, the founder of the Macroom Mountain Dew Festival, has said that he counted more than forty vacant premises between ‘Fitzy’s Corner’ near the bus station on the eastern side of the town and the Castle in the Square.

JP Quinlan says the owners of derelict and vacant buildings should be taxed heavily to compel them to either bring their buildings back from dereliction and put them to use or sell them.

“If you were putting a tax on a vacant property of €10,000 per year, the owner of that property is not going to pay the €10,000 so what they will have to do is do up the property or sell it and obviously the person who buys it is going to do it up,” said Mr Quinlan.

“They’re giving up to €70,000, incredible grants, to do up derelict properties but still people aren’t doing them up but if you fine them or tax them €10,000 a year, they’ll have to either do it up or sell it.”

According to the businessman, this would create accommodation and add immensely to the town.

He said he was an admirer of towns on the continent where a great deal of pedestrianisation had taken place and said that it would look well in Macroom - but the issue of parking had to be resolved first.

HOUSING

Housing in Macroom is in great demand and a number of developments are being built or are about to be built.

“There’s hundreds of houses built, being built or about to be built in town,” said Cllr Ted Lucey, the Fine Gael representative who is chairperson of the Municipal District Council.

A perennial issue in the town is its upkeep, picking up litter, maintenance of gullies, weeding, the type of work that happens behind the scenes but makes a big difference in the way the town looks.

As independent councillor, Martin Coughlan, a long-standing volunteer with the local Tidy Towns puts it, there used to be a time when there were ‘two or three’ people working on maintaining the town but now there’s only one person.

“It’s impossible for one person to keep the whole town going and if it weren’t for the work of the Tidy Towns people, who are continually picking up litter and doing other jobs, the town would be knee-deep in it,” said Mr Coughlan.

There are public realm works happening or planned for the town-centre to take advantage of the bypass - and the Briery Gap Theatre and Library will open in late summer with a brand new cultural complex on the Main Street with plans for a plaza to the front.

While this will enhance the town, it will mean that the issues around litter and general maintenance will come into even sharper focus.

The bypass is only one road and it bypasses Macroom.

The electoral area is criss-crossed by other roads which are beset by problems such as potholes, encroaching hedges and other issues.

A bridge near Carriganima on the road to Millstreet was a focus of attention in the past few months as it had been left in a precarious state following a collision.

“The main issues are the state of the roads and footpaths and the problem is we don’t get enough funding,” said Martin Coughlan.

At a recent meeting of Cork County Council, elected members were told that roads would only be maintained once every fifty years due to the lack of an adequate allocation from central Government.

The roads bring us to the rest of the electoral area which stretches from Aherla in the east to Baile Mhúirne and Cúil Aodha in the west to Millstreet in the north and Béal Átha’n Ghaorthaidh to the south.

The village of Béal Átha’n Ghaorthaidh had around twenty inhabitants in the 1930s when a holding tank for the community’s sewage was installed.

There are now around 60 houses in the community and every time there’s a flood the sewage floods the fields behind one side of the street and the football field of Béal Átha’n Ghaorthaidh is impacted.

“We’ve spoken to councillors and they have made the case to Uisce Éireann,” said Tadhg Ó Duinnín of Coiste Forbartha Bhéal Átha’n Ghaorthaidh. “We were first on the list for a new wastewater treatment plant ten years ago - we appear nowhere on a list now.

“The reality is that the village is under threat of being flooded with sewage everytime there’s a flood and we have plenty of people who would like to build locally but can’t as they must have their own septic tank and there aren’t sites this big in the village.”

Because the local council and county council resources are stretched to the limit, opportunities for growth and development are being missed.

According to Caroline Nolan, the manager of Comharchumann Forbartha Mhúscraí which is an agency for the development of the Múscraí Gaeltacht including the villages of Baile Mhuirne, Cúil Aodha, Cill na Martra, Béal Átha’n Ghaorthaidh and Réidh na nDoirí, the area is a thriving vibrant area ‘against the odds’.

“This is down to the local communities and a creative, entrepreneurial spirit that flows from our language, culture and heritage,” said Ms. Nolan. “We want councillors who are in tune with the importance of our language and show leadership in embracing it as the great asset it for County Cork.”

An example of a missed opportunity, she said, is the fact that while Macroom has been designated as a Gaeltacht Service Town, which could entitle it to a yearly grant of €80,000 to employ a development officer, there seems to have been no move to make this happen yet.