Reply To: Irelands Ten Worst Roundabouts

I like the idea of timber framed homes as it is a much easier material to work with than stone. Particularly with maintenance down the line, but I think like many other things a stone/concrete house is deeply engrained into the national psyche.

Re Overseas development aid and Bruce Willis types I agree entirely having experience of Latin America and West Africa. They are like the mandarin classes of the Irish civil service 30 years ago.
Going around in their USAID or EU badged jeeps either gringos or natives ‘a station above their peers’.

But back to roundabouts, they are a reflection of the lack of ambition that has plagued our infrastructural development. The german wodr Kreutz actually means something modern and functional it is not a relic of a word.

To arrange your principal highways out of Dublin (N7&N4) as secondary to a 1/4 completed ring road was just bizarre. There is a very good road junction in England that probably didn’t cost the earth to build and is not overly complicated. It is the turn off from the M6 to North Wales, where the M56 crosses the M6. It merely involves two sperate motorways crossing at 90 degrees and a roundabout to filter merging traffic. I have never seen tailbacks there.

Tribunals are an expensive process but most of the costs involved are created by those under ‘pressure’ such as Burke and Lawlor and Redmond lying blatantly. That said the PR consultant on Mondays Q&A hit the nail on the head when she said that only hostile witnesses should feature in public sittings. They need reform urgently. But not before we get to the bottom of Quarryvale I hope.