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Seanad
‹ An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business

School road safety in Limerick

Summary

Senator Collins called for safer routes to school, citing missing crossings and unsafe traffic conditions outside Dromcollogher National School.

Today, I raise the issue of schools, active travel and safe routes to schools. There is a school in County Limerick that has raised an issue where there is no pedestrian crossing outside the school, none of those lovely coloured crayon bollards for children to exit the school safely. We are coming into the nice weather now where kids might want to be able to walk home from school or cycle. Dromcollogher National School is on a main road through Dromcollogher which is also the main road from Newcastle West to Cork. If any of the trucks and lorries are going, that is the route they take. There are no speed bumps on that road so they tend to travel at quite a good speed going through because it is just outside the town. We have an active travel fund in Limerick. Limerick city and county are together when it comes to the council funding. Limerick city got 87% of active travel funding and Limerick county got 13%. Limerick county has a much bigger landmass than the city and we also would not exactly have footpaths to every single school in the county. I know my own local school has no footpath to it so it would be next to impossible for children to walk to school or even cycle to school safely. My issue is that you have the same population in both city and county and there is a bigger landmass in the county. I know it is probably not up to the Government to decide what way each council distributes its funding but I think there needs to be a little bit of fairness when it comes to the likes of active travel and safe routes to schools, so that it is not going to be better to be in school in the city than in the county. It is another way of pushing people and families closer to cities. If we want to look at keeping what we have in rural Ireland, we need to look at making it safe as well as the cities.

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