Sir, – The Dublin City Council’s response to the NTA traffic plan for the city centre is sadly misjudged (Home News, September 13th). It doesn’t take an expert to appreciate that there are huge commercial and tourist benefits to creating a pedestrian-friendly corridor linking Grafton Street with Henry Street. Currently College Green, one of the finest public spaces in the State, is a glorified bus terminus and Westmoreland street is a retail desert. The reactionary response from the city officials reminds me of the negativity that greeted the first proposals to ban cars from Grafton Street followed more recently by the naysaying surrounding the Luas proposals which resulted in a costly gap between the two tramlines.
The sad state of the public infrastructure of our beautiful historic city core should be a source of shame for these officials and rather than attempting to strangle a forward-thinking proposal at birth, they should be apologising to the public and not the councillors for their own lack of vision. – Yours, etc,
JOHN O’MAHONY,
Friarsland Road,
Goatstown, Dublin 14.