“It was bad enough when they were coming at night… now they’re coming during the day”.
So said Cllr Mary Hilda Cavanagh while warning Castlecomer Municipal District members of young drivers carrying out doughnuts in the Johnstown area.
She called for rumble strips to be installed in particular where a section of the road used runs above the motorway between Dublin and Cork.
The meeting was told the issue is widespread and only gardaí can stop such activity.
Cllr Cavanagh says something needs to be done before something “horrendously serious” happens, telling KCLR News; “There’s a roundabout on Grangefertagh Lane over the M8 and young people are doing doughnuts on the bridge overhead and the local people are petrified for themselves, for the people doing these doughnuts but more importantly for the people who are driving the motorway because car skids out of control and goes down onto the motorway the man above only knows what damage could be done to peoples’ lives”.
Cllr Cavanagh aims to raise the issue with schools too in the hope they might consider doing more to highlight the dangers of such activity and she says action needs to be taken to prevent something serious from happening – and that might need a multi-agency approach; “The matter’s going to be discussed at the next Joint Policing Committee and it’s also going to be discussed at the strategic policy committee on transportation but a solution will have to be found and sooner rather than later, between the Garda Síochána and the county council officials”.
Cllr Cavanagh also has this appeal to those involved in such activity; “We never think of the tragedies that could lie ahead and they don’t realise that if anything happened to any of them the grief and the heartbreak and the awfulness of the aftermath of it – we all know what it’s like to loose somebody in our own parish through a car accident or farm accident but it just doesn’t affect the family, it affects the extended family, the community and the wider community; it’s something that doesn’t need to happen”.
