OPINION: Pat McArt
Last Thursday night I happened to be in Letterkenny visiting family. Traffic had been bad on the way-in so my wife suggested on the way-out I should wait until after 6pm as she felt the congestion would have eased by then.
Boy, did she – and me – get that wrong.
The short version is that I left the Ashfield Estate, which is near the Mountain Top, at around 6.15pm and it was 6.49 when I hit the green light at the Port Bridge.
More than half an hour to travel two/three miles, and it was not even peak time.
Let me contrast that with Sligo, a town that is about the same size as Letterkenny.
I recently had occasion to visit there on a busy Thursday and I sailed through it in about ten minutes. No gridlock, no stress, no frustration.
And the reason is staring us in the face.
In Sligo Bus Éireann has, for more than 20 years, been providing a town bus service, operating two separate routes to the outlying areas of the town.
And just for good measure, earlier this month they not only introduced a third route but announced significant upgrading on the existing two routes.
Apparently too, if reports I read are accurate, the proposed bridge over the Garavogue is in its final stages of planning. It’s ready to roll.
By way of contrast Letterkenny has been waiting on a bridge over the Swilly for about 50 years – if anyone wants to check the archives of any local paper I think they’d find a report where the late town councillor, Patsy O’Donnell made that proposal in the early 1970s – and has some paltry proposal to put a town service in place by the end of this year.
I don’t think I’m being deliberately cynical but put it like this, I wouldn’t bet the family farm on it.
There are, of course, real life consequences for this kind of inaction.
A couple of months back I was stuck in traffic just past the Clanree Hotel when I caught in my rearview mirror the flashing lights of an ambulance totally hemmed in between two lorries. I don’t know how long it took for a path to be cleared for it to get through, but in a life or death situation I would think that delay could have been critical.
A few days later I saw on social media a video where a Garda car, again with all lights flashing, mount the footpath in the same area as it attempted to skip past the stationary vehicles on Donegal’s biggest unintended car park.
In 2007 the government announced that they were going to upgrade the road network from Donegal to Dublin by building a dual carriageway from Letterkenny to Derry to connect up with the planned upgrade of the A5 in the north connecting Derry to Aughnacloy.
Yet when the financial crash happened in 2008 it was one of the first things the government announced it was cancelling. Other projects down south went ahead. I suppose I should throw in here too that just a few weeks back I read a report where it was disclosed that Letterkenny is now the largest town in Ireland without a rail connection.
And it’s not just infrastructure where Letterkenny is getting the second-hand treatment.
In the latest figures I could come across it seems that in 2022, Letterkenny University Hospital was the sixth busiest in the country with almost 26,000 patients yet it was only 12th in terms of budget allocation.
Sligo, again by way of contrast, didn’t even it make it on to the list of ‘Top 15 Busiest Irish Hospitals’ – I don’t know where it charted on the list – but it came in with a budget that almost matched that of Letterkenny.
For people like Roseena Toner, who said she had been attending the Oncology Unit at Letterkenny for four years, there is a price to be paid for this.
I came across her story on Facebook where she recently wrote: “Donegal is the third largest county in Ireland with a high cancer rate and a cancer unit that you wouldn’t get in a Third World country. All this talk of a new cancer centre of excellence in Galway which will cover the west/north-west, is just shocking.
“No smart person who has looked at a map of Ireland will buy this. There’s a big distance from Galway to Malin Head and a lot of sick people in between. In my opinion the cancer services in Letterkenny are slowly being pushed out the door. Donegal needs its own state of the art cancer unit, with wards, treatment rooms, theatre, offices, pharmacy, ICU and whatever else a Cancer Unit should have.”
It’s ridiculous that Sligo and Letterkenny are two towns with virtually the same size of population, in the same corner of the country yet in terms of public service investment there is no comparison. How is that happening? Why is it happening?
Our public representatives really have got to stop the waffling and get this sorted.
