The council will move “as soon as we can” to make children and parents going to and from St Patrick’s National School in Chapelizod safer, senior executive engineer Colm Ennis told the South Central Area Committee on 11 December.
The school sits at the intersection of Chapelizod Road and Main Street, and there was a car crash there in late November.
At the meeting, Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan said he’d put in a question to the council executive asking if there could be some kind of “traffic calming” put in around the school to make the area safer.
“While I welcome the response that it’s going to be referred to the TAG [Traffic Advisory Group] system, we all know in all fairness that that’ll sometimes take some length of time,” Doolan said.
“I think there’s a concern with parents, pupils and staff that there may not be time on their side because of the risk posed to the children and the parents crossing there,” he said. Is there a way to speed things up? he asked.
Independent Councillor Vincent Jackson said he also had asked about making the area around the school safer, and had had the same response from the executive.
“But I would agree with you, Councillor Doolan, that from time to time there’s ones that come up that necessitate a speedier response maybe than the system we have,” he said.
Ennis, a senior executive engineer in the council’s Environment and Transportation Department, said: “We are actively looking at that situation, we do appreciate that there is an issue there.”
“We are actively looking at if there’s measures we can put in in TAG in the very short term,” Ennis said. “We are looking at it very closely.”
Why no school zone?
In 2022, the Chapelizod Village Transport Assessment for Dublin City Council recommended a “Safe Routes to School Audit for St. Patrick’s National School. School Zone safety improvements (in conjunction with NTA and Green Schools).”
And the report recommended the same for St. Laurence’s National School, about 300 metres away from St Patrick’s, on Martin’s Row.
The National Transport Authority’s (NTA’s) Safe Routes to School programme involves putting in things like pencil-shaped bollards, colourful road markings, improved footpaths, and better pedestrian crossings “to highlight the presence of the school and encourage traffic to slow down”, according to the NTA.
But those school zones haven’t been put in around the schools. In a 21 November 2024 email, Labour Party Senator Rebecca Moynihan said “It seems that a ball was dropped”.
“Other schools with no through traffic are school zones while St Patrick’s at a busy, dangerous junction with high level of emissions has had no improvements,” she said.
When the NTA launched the programme in 2021, “932 schools, nearly a quarter of all schools nationally applied”, its website says. Since then, it has announced three rounds of funding awards to schools that had applied.
In November, the NTA announced the names of 141 schools that would get these school zones in the third round of funding, including 10 in the Dublin City Council area. But neither of the Chapelizod schools has been given school zone funding yet.
Why not? “St Patrick’s and St Laurence’s schools did not apply to the National Transport Authority’s Safe Routes to School programme, which is why they’re not on the applicant list,” a Dublin City Council spokesperson said.
Neither St Patrick’s nor St Laurence’s have responded to queries about this sent 9 December. But at the South Central Area Committee meeting, Green Party Councillor Ray Cunningham said he’d been in contact with St Patrick’s.
“I’ve been in touch with the NTA and the school to try to get them on the list and they didn’t apply,” he said. “I think the opening of the applications coincided with the return after covid and things like that so they weren’t in a position to apply.”
Short-term, medium-term
As for the recommendations of the Chapelizod Village Transport Assessment, the council spokesperson said the council has been working on the short-term ones first.
These have been “advanced to a point where drawings have been prepared and DCC have liaised with Fingal County Council”, he said. “These short term recommendations would be implemented on a trial basis initially. However this is subject to the availability of funding and resources.”
As short-term measures, the report recommended considering a one-way system on Martin’s Row, with a narrowed carriageway and 30km/h speed limit, and reducing the speed limit on Main Street to 30km/h, among others. The “timeline for implementation” was listed as “Short Term (0-12 months)”.
The recommendation to bring in school zones was for the medium-term, the spokesperson said. “The DCC School Zone team is only resourced to progress works currently with schools on the Safe Routes to School programme list, funded by the NTA,” he said.
The “timeline for implementation” was listed in the village transport assessment as “Medium Term (12-36 months)”. The report is dated 33 months ago.
