Residents call for infrastructure before housing is built

Residents of Maglin Road have said that they want to see the completion of the South Ballincollig Sustainable Transport Corridor before any large-scale residential development in the area.

Local resident Kevin Cooper has been living on Maglin Road for 35 years. There are 22 other houses on the road, and he said that the impact of traffic without any development ongoing is already heavy.

"We're having to wait to get out of our houses," he said. "Giving a residential development access through an urban country road, it's not on really."

The road itself lacks many basic amenities that he said would be expected for such a large scale development, such as a footpath or street lighting.

"In a development that would house a lot of young people, they wouldn't be able to walk down the road or to the village due to the danger posed by the traffic. We were promised by TDs when I moved up here in 1991 that we would be getting street lighting, and it still hasn't arrived," he said. Residents on the road are worried that if the development were to go ahead without the transport corridor being in place, then Maglin Road will become completely congested with construction traffic. Cooper said that residents met with the O'Flynn Group to express their concerns, who he said were receptive to them.

"But they can't do anything about street lighting, and they can't do anything about traffic calming, all they can do is try to keep the number of lorries down, but that's not going to happen at all.

"Everyone's just going to take the shortest route," he said.

However, he stressed that the residents were not opposed to the development itself, and simply want to see the transport corridor finished before it is begun.

"We didn't lodge an objection to it as a group because everyone knows we need houses. But we want to see the proper infrastructure put in place so as not to impact us as residents too much," he said. Cork City Council refused permission to developer Michael O'Flynn for the development in August, saying that it was premature before the transport corridor was completed.

The proposal consisted of 638 houses, 512 apartments and duplex units, a creche, three retail units, and the restoration of Maglin House.

The proposed plans included the upfront delivery of 550 metres of the corridor. Mr O'Flynn, who serves as the CEO of O'Flynn Group, said that the decision was "incomprehensible and frustrating".

An appeal of the decision is expected to be decided by An Coimisiún Pleanála on 1 November.

This article was produced with the support of the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme funded by Coimisiún na Meán.