I’m just writing this letter in the hope that it may persuade some of our elected representatives in Donegal to start speaking up on behalf of Letterkenny.
Letterkenny now has a population fast approaching 25,000, which makes it by far the largest town in the county, yet it doesn’t have a local TD and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that those TDs who were elected in the Donegal constituency show very little affinity for Letterkenny or the problems it is facing.
Just last year when the decision was taken to move the Donegal Education Support Centre (DESC) from Donegal Town to Letterkenny there were expressions of outrage from basically every elected political representative in the county.
Numerous councillors, Senators, TDs were calling for public protest meetings, questions were being raised in the Dáil, TDs were seeking meetings with the Education Minister and publicly demanding that the Minister personally put a stay on the decision to relocate. It wasn’t as if the DESC was being taken out of the county, it was just being moved from one part of the county to another, yet the elected politicians who were supposed to be also representing Letterkenny, made it very clear where their allegiance lay.
If you contrast that political indignation with the muted response and almost tacit acceptance from our local elected representatives to the news last week that Letterkenny is being left in limbo following the National Transport Authority’s (NTA) disclosure that there is no confirmed timeline yet for the new town bus service in Letterkenny.
This is despite the fact that back in 2024 following public consultations, the NTA proposed they would have a local urban bus service up and running in Letterkenny by the end of 2025, which would operate two routes within the town, with buses running every 30 minutes, 17 hours a day, seven days a week.
Now it appears that the NTA currently are only at the liaising stage with Donegal County Council, designing the new routes and the bus stop locations. This has all the hallmarks of the much anticipated ‘New Bridge’ over the Swilly that Letterkenny has been eagerly waiting on for decades but still hasn’t materialised.
So why have our local politicians not been demanding answers from the powers that be as to why the NTA are so far behind their own proposed schedule, in the aftermath of the NTA disclosure, I decided to type two questions into Google:
(1) What is the largest town in Ireland that doesn’t have a railway station?
(2) What is the largest town in Ireland that doesn’t have a National Transport Authority (NTA) Bus Service?
I wasn’t shocked to discover that Google’s answer to both questions was Letterkenny.
If you just compare Letterkenny with Sligo which is the only other town in the north west with a similar size population. Sligo has had a subsidised NTA operated Town Bus Service running for over 25 years and even had a new additional third route added to the existing service last year.
The residents of Letterkenny pay their taxes the same as the people in all the similar size towns throughout the state so why are we the ones who always seem to be passed over or are the last to receive whatever initiatives the state provides?
Letterkenny as a town is slowly suffocating, infrastructure investment is falling far short of what’s needed to keep up with the rapid population growth of the town.
The town is in constant gridlock, with traffic grinding to near a complete stop in the early morning and the late afternoon almost everyday, yet for some reason the only road traffic initiative which the council appears to be actively pursuing is to narrow the existing roads around the town in order to put in cycle lanes.
It would be nice if our elected political representatives could pursue initiatives to alleviate our problems and not compound them.
Yours,
Concerned resident.
Name and address with editor