The Northern Distributor Road

It was dressed up as a solution for traffic but it was much more about developing land on the outskirts of Limerick. Land development and speculation has always made people wealthy and it would have been no different here. Had the project been built it would have been a catalyst for the sprawl of the city northwards. Why the Senior Executives of Clare County Council and Limerick City and County Council, much more than the elected councillors, were obsessed with it, I do not know. The opportunity cost of that obsession was that genuinely crucial regional infrastructure projects like the railway to Shannon were totally ignored. That is a severe black mark against the management of both local authorities.

"The eulogy was short in the end" was how a friend noted this news to me earlier. It seemed at times over the years that this huge project was unstoppable. Paradoxically, very few even knew about it, or will ever know about it now. And they won't know what went in to stopping it. A small few activists, friends amongst them, kept a flame of resistance flickering for over a decade. Those of us who found ourselves in a position to influence this outcome took that chance, and we were able to do so because Limerick and Clare elected Greens to our city and county councils and to our national parliament. There is no doubt in my mind that were it not for the efforts of our members that the outcome today would be very different. I'm proud of us all tonight. Let this road be just a footnote in history, but nothing more than that. I hope that the city and region will develop in the coming years and decades now in a way that it would have made impossible, and for that reason we'll forget about it.