The Castlemartyr bypass: historical roots of a failure in government

This study has grown out of a private briefing exercise examining the failure to construct a short and desperately needed bypass around the congested village of Castlemartyr in east Cork, a dereliction not simply attributable to the successive groupings of politicians who have held office but more seriously to the process of government itself. It soon became clear that the problem had deep historical roots. There had been a time, around 1800, when Ireland had built new roads, mainly for stagecoaches but also to make it easier to move troops around the country. The coming of the railways had led to a century of fossilisation for the highways, although they were tarred by the 1920s for the use of motor vehicles. When Ireland industrialised after the Second World War, the roads inherited from the past were simply required to carry the massively increased burden of traffic, and the country has been catching up, or failing to catch up, ever since. Castlemartyr (and its neighbour, Killeagh) are easily eliminated bottlenecks on a highway of national importance between Cork and Rosslare, but the concept of a south-coast through route was slow to emerge and still does not seem to be fully recognised by the planning system.         

It was not difficult to identify a historical dimension to the problem, a long-term backlog in the provision of infrastructure which undoubtedly adds to the challenge faced by a planning and policy system that is already inherently incapable of providing a dynamic response. Since historians have given little attention to highways – I gratefully draw upon the insights of the few exceptions – it is not generally appreciated that Ireland's uneven modernisation has been based upon a road network that was never intended to carry modern traffic volumes. In particular, in the mid-twentieth century, Ireland not only eagerly embraced industrialisation without any accompanying debate on the necessary highways infrastructure, but problems were compounded by policy-makers who were actively hostile to the construction of what one Taoiseach called racetracks for plutocrats. One effect of this myopia was that even the notion of long-distance connections – I refer here in particular to the south-coast Rosslare-to-Cork route – emerged only piecemeal, leaving an already arthritic government machine struggling to catch up with the reality on the ground.

Yet there was no historical reason that dictated this complacent conversion of boreens into autobahns, no inherent Hibernian gene deficiency that prevented engagement with an integrated transport policy. The absence of a narrative history of the development of roads in Ireland has obscured the remarkably innovative period from the eighteenth century to the eve of the Famine when a combination of local initiatives and intermittent central government support not only upgraded the medieval highway inheritance but created wholly new lines of road which were constructed to greatly improved standards.  Broadly, there were two driving forces that explain this era of infrastructural improvement. First, we should not forget that Ireland was a heavily militarised country. In 1798, it was their ability to move troops around the country that enabled the authorities to maintain their grip by confronting local discontent and suppressing specific outbreaks of rebellion.^[1] Second, stagecoaches and passenger services like Bianconi's cars ushered in a new era of public transport which required roads superior to cattle tracks. The disaster of the Famine produced the final burst of this investment in infrastructure: from the summer of 1846, literally hundreds of small-scale projects were commissioned to provide work for hungry people. Hills were sliced through and roads mended, widened and straightened, usually over short stretches, improvised schemes that used wheelbarrows, picks and shovels to pay wages. In popular memory, these localised projects became fused with the inheritance of larger projects that dated back to Grattan's Parliament and beyond, with the result that any long, straight stretch of highway became known as a 'Famine road'. In the event, the localised make-work projects of the eighteen-forties would represent the last major investment in the road network over a century. When the Famine struck, Ireland was already taking the first steps into the railway age: Dublin and Cork were linked in 1849, and trains ran to Midleton from 1859 and as far as Youghal the following year. Almost all major transportation projects in the following decades were railway lines: one of the last of them was opened in 1906, linking the new port of Rosslare with Waterford and the wider rail system.^[2] Of course we should not make too much of the highways inheritance from the days of Daniel O'Connell. (O'Connell's career as a national political leader was itself made possible by these improvements in internal communications.) In its era, the stagecoach was an impressive new form of transportation, but it was not designed to carry anything like heavy loads of modern trucks. Nor was it – by modern standards – particularly fast: the major upgrade of arterial routes undertaken around 1800 by John Anderson, the entrepreneur who created the town of Fermoy, made it possible for the first time to travel between Dublin and Cork in less than twenty-four hours. Grafting a twentieth-century manufacturing economy on to a network designed for postillions with post-horns was an astonishingly short-sighted decision. Indeed, if a decision is a resolution in response to a formally posed question, then no such policy was ever adopted, since the road network was not even considered as Ireland industrialised.  

Castlemartyr is a village in County Cork, thirty kilometres east of Cork City and about ten kilometres from the terminus of the commuter rail line that links the city to Midleton.^[3] It has a population of about 2,000, which has doubled in the past twenty years: if we include the nearby village of Ladysbridge to the south and the agglomeration of housing that has somehow landed at Mogeely to the north, Metro-Castlemartyr can claim about 4,000 people. One of Ireland's major highways, the N25, passes along a village street that is just 400 metres in length. At the west end of the street, a right-angled bend leads into a narrow cutting. At the east end, traffic lights at a busy crossroads cause tailbacks. A popular National School, with an enrolment of 225 pupils in 2025, is located 150 metres further east from the village street. It has a wide catchment area, which means that many of the children travel to and from school by car. The delivery of youngsters at just the point where westbound vehicles are queueing for the lights complicates the traffic flow during the morning rush hour. An unnamed local resident complained in 2019 that "at 9 a.m. and at school collection times, 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. it is just chaotic".^[4]

Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) records traffic flows through pressure-operated counters set into the N25 at Loughaderra, a few kilometres west of Castlemartyr.^[5]  In May 2026, the total daily count was around 18,000 vehicles, almost one thousand of them heavy goods vehicles.^[6] (On Thursday 26 June, when temperatures hit record levels, the traffic count at Loughaderra topped 19,000.) The TII data paints a grim picture of a vehicle travelling the N25 every five seconds throughout the day, but it does not tell the whole story of the pressure upon the narrow main street of Castlemartyr. The Loughaderra sensors can be assumed to provide accurate information about the long-distance movement of trucks and vans, caravans and buses but they do not register all local journeys by car, such as school runs and shopping trips within the village. There is every reason to accept the claims made by campaigners that Castlemartyr endures 22,000 to 24,000 vehicles every day. Nor do the Loughaderra statistics take account of the fact that many motorists avoid the bottleneck by using local rat-runs, most notably the unsuitable minor roads from Killeagh through Mogeely, including the narrow and sinuous L3809 (it is not even designated as a second-rank R-Regional Road) which is particularly unsuitable for heavy volumes of traffic.^[7] Indeed, overall traffic statistics at Loughaderra have been oddly stable throughout the past decade.^[8]  The systemic failure of government to build the much-needed bypass has forced regular travellers to conclude that Castlemartyr has reached saturation point. Perversely, the use of a dangerous rat-run reduces the numbers recorded on the N25, thereby seeming to devalue the crisis in Castlemartyr.

However, while cars can divert through Mogeely, the main N25 has continued to register an upward trend in heavy goods vehicles (HGVs), which increased by over two hundred on a daily basis over the decade between 2015 and 2025. Every two-and-a-half weeks, an extra truck has squeezed through Castlemartyr's village street. Who would notice two additional trucks passing through a village every four weeks over a ten-year period? It is an interesting example of the way that a problem can grow by barely perceptible accretion until it becomes totally unmanageable. The end result is that the pressure upon this small community is now intolerable.^[9]

Not surprisingly, it is widely believed in east Cork that such a situation would not be accepted in the country's capital. As one contributor to social media put it, "Ireland is East Coast/Dublin Centric – no one in Leinster House knows where Castlemartyr is.... anything outside of East Coast is ignored." One of the earliest bypasses in the State, opened in 1991, relieved the County Dublin suburban village of Shankill, because it was self-evidently impossible that this community should be expected to cope with 21,000 vehicles a day.^[10] Thirty-five years later, the planning process displays no such concern for a similar burden at Castlemartyr. Yet it would be a tactical mistake to argue the urgent case for a bypass in terms that could be dismissed as simply a plea for some small village in the depths of Munster, an argument that has clearly not aroused much sympathy from a government machine that orders its priorities from the perspective of a distant capital city. The increase particularly in the number of articulated trucks passing through Castlemartyr is a reminder that the N25 is something more than a congested main road in the back of beyond. It is, above all, the arterial link between Cork, Ireland's second city, and Rosslare Europort, the country's increasingly important economic link to the European continent. "Due to its location on the main route from Cork to Waterford and the port of Rosslare, a considerable volume of freight transport passes through the village resulting in large tailbacks in both directions in the mornings and evenings," Cork East Fine Gael Deputy David Stanton attempted to explain to policy-makers in 2019.^[11] Although the Europort is 160 kilometres  away, its round-the-clock operations and sailing schedules dictate the movements of many of the trucks, causing pressure on Castlemartyr for at least twenty hours out of every twenty-four. In addition, the N25 also serves the ports of Waterford and New Ross, as well as linking the south-east to the Port of Cork.^[12] In 2024, Transport Minister Darragh O'Brien specifically singled out "freight traffic to the ports of Cork and Waterford and Rosslare Europort" as key contributors to congestion in Castlemartyr.^[13] Cork's Ro-Ro facilities are at Ringaskiddy, on the west side of Cork Harbour, but there is a secondary container berth upriver at Tivoli, just three kilometres from the start of the N25 at Dunkettle. Although it was previously scheduled for closure, Tivoli is now expected to operate until 2045. Although it does not have Ro-Ro facilities, the Port of Waterford at Belview is also expanding its container capacity and is connected to the N25 by a 5-kilometre link road. These developments have increasingly negative implications for the traffic problem at Castlemartyr.

Everyone who comments on the Castlemartyr bottleneck pays lip service to the impact of Rosslare upon Castlemartyr, but few seem to grasp just how much the Europort has grown in recent years.^[14] In 2010, it handled 120,000 loaded trucks carrying 2.5 million tonnes of freight; by 2025, this had increased to 220,000 loaded trucks and 3.5 million tonnes. The increase has been particularly striking in recent years, with truck numbers passing through Rosslare more than doubling since 2020, the first year of Covid.^[15] The Europort's rapid growth has followed the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union in 2020. Prior to 'Brexit', most of Ireland's external freight traffic to the continent used Britain as a land bridge. The majority of services from Rosslare still go to Fishguard and Pembroke in Wales, but there are now 38 round-trip sailings each week to Bilbao, Cherbourg, Dunkirk and Zeebrugge.^[16] "We are open 24 hours a day 365 days a year to meet the current requirements of customers," the Rosslare Europort website proudly proclaimed in May 2026, bizarrely adding "but can open outside of these hours by arrangement."^[17] This intriguing boast would suggest that Rosslare is the only port on the planet to operate in the fifth dimension, although perhaps it simply indicates a willingness to work an extra day in Leap Years. There can be no doubt that the booming gateway at Ireland's south-east corner makes a major impact upon a cramped village street 160 kilometres away, one that is likely to increase in coming years. Of course, the 220,000 heavy goods vehicles that enter the country at Rosslare do not all head for Castlemartyr – even though around 300,000 lorries and trucks crawl along the village street annually.^[18] But enough of them pass through to constitute a steady additional burden that no small community should have to endure. Rosslare is an admirably dynamic enterprise: it has expanded its activities in recent years despite the disruption of a pandemic and the disruption of wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East. There is every indication that the Europort will continue to invest, attract and expand. The pressures upon Castlemartyr will continue to increase, like a medieval torturer tightening the notches on a rack. The causes delays and tailbacks there affect the entire south-coast economy, and they can only get worse. 

In 2007, the Irish Examiner described Castlemartyr as a "nightmare for motorists at peak times". It was at that time that Deputy David Stanton predicted that the "very lengthy delays" were "going to get worse…. We need to fast-track a bypass".^[19] A relief road here – and at Killeagh – would hardly represent a major project, nor do the schemes require much cogitation and planning. Both villages have a right-angled bend in the main street that effectively dictates the route – north around Castlemartyr, south and east at Killeagh – with three to four kilometres of tarmac needed at the first but barely half that to circumvent the second. Jointly, these hardly represent a gigantic project.^[20] The fact that this obvious solution, one that would benefit the entire south coast economy, has produced, at most, a sluggish and disengaged response from central government explains much of the anger and cynicism felt in east Cork and beyond. What appears to be the wilful refusal to provide an obvious and easily attainable solution to an infuriating problem will generate a much wider loss of faith in the political system.

Worse still, official thinking seems determined to bury the reality of these two bottlenecks within fantastical classifications of the N25 as part of imaginary long-distance routes, with ponderous claims that are, at best, aspirational and, at worst, an insult to public intelligence. At the opening of the Waterford bypass in 2009, the then Minister of Transport stated that "the N25 forms part of the North/South Corridor that runs from Belfast, via Dublin and Rosslare to Cork".^[21] A few months earlier, the M8 Dublin-Cork motorway had been completed, meaning that only meandering scenic tourists from Ulster would use the N25 to reach the Republic's second city. In 2020, Transport Infrastructure Ireland described the New Ross bypass as "a strategic link in the national road network linking Cork and Rosslare, which forms part of the 'Atlantic Road Corridor' route that eventually will link Waterford in the south-east to Letterkenny in the north-west by dual carriageway or motorway".^[22] The N25 does not terminate in Waterford City, but continues to Rosslare: is this strange configuration intended to obscure the importance of the south-cast route? More widely known, and held in genial derision, is the engaging fantasy that cross-classifies the N25 as part of European Route E30. In recent times this was defined as running from Tralee to Moscow, but it seems to have quietly rebranded as the highway linking Cork with Omsk. Those concerned with the more-than-sufficient real-world congestion in Castlemartyr may gratefully note that it is unlikely that there is much through traffic between Siberia and Munster. It is difficult to explain why officialdom is addicted to these stairway-to-the-stars descriptions of workaday main roads, but tempting to regard this miasma of twaddle as an attempt to deny the fundamental reality that the N25 is a highway of national importance, the south coast link that connects Cork and Rosslare and that it is seriously impeded by two easily removable bottlenecks.

In May 2026, two decades on from the first suggestions of a bypass around Castlemartyr, a contract was signed between Cork County Council and design consultants to plan for a new highway between Midleton and Youghal.^[23] Here, again, the vital need for the two short relief roads risks being wrapped up in a larger project which can be too easily sidelined as too ambitious for practical implementation. Somehow, the policy-making system still seems unable to grasp the sensible suggestion made by Fine Gael Cork County Councillor Michael Hegarty (who lives near  Ladysbridge) that "planners should first consider building small relief roads around villages, designed so they can later be incorporated into the wider network".^[24] Fianna Fáil Deputy James O'Connor, an energetic campaigner for the two bypasses, hailed the contract-signing as evidence that the projects are now 'go-go-go', but a start on construction does not seem to be envisaged before 2030, a delay that many find inexplicable. An informative website on road projects was quietly sceptical: "we have heard this date given for so many schemes lately that it seems more like the date the government give when they have no idea when it will be ready".^[25]  Fianna Fáil County Councillor Ann Marie Ahern commented that the proposed timetable "still falls shy of the existing day to day issues for road users". Contributors to social media offered even more pungent comments, often reinforced with expletives that are deleted here: "why 2030 - why does it take five years to plan?!" "How in the name of Christ has Castlemartyr not been bypassed?"   

The historical dimension "All these roads were made hundreds of years ago, so long ago that nobody knows," a correspondent from Ladysbridge informed the Irish Folklore Commission in the nineteen-thirties.^[26] It is easy to take refuge in the familiar fact that the Irish word bóthar (its borrowed diminutive, 'boreen', is a Hiberno-English gem) literally means 'cow path': many minor byways, like the twisting and dangerous L3809 between Killeagh and Mogeely, could hardly have been designed by intelligent human agency.  However, in 1810 the Reverend Horatio Townsend advanced an alternative theory to explain County Cork's unsatisfactory highways heritage. It was important to remember, he pointed out, that the roads dated from an era when there were few wheeled vehicles. "We are not therefore too rashly to condemn the conduct of our forefathers, who, instead of looking for lines and levels through deep and unmanageable morasses, sought a dry passage, where only it could then be well obtained, on the tops of hills." Since loads were carried on horseback, and most journeys were performed on foot, "the shortest passage and the firmest ground were the sole objects of want and of attainment". Travellers sought the very feature that modern transport needed to avoid: "elevation of ground". "Whoever examines the old course of the roads from town to town, will find it invariably passing over the summits of all the intermediate hills. Originally these roads seem to have been little more than pathways." There is little doubt that he was right.  In 1700, most journeys were made indeed on foot, and most freight carried by packhorses; a century later, carriages and carts were the norm, and the roads had to improve accordingly. The real fault, according to Townsend, lay not with those who first sketched out the roads but with succeeding generations. "When it became expedient to enlarge and amend the public ways, instead of striking out new and improved lines, they generally followed the old course. In form and firmness the amended roads were unexceptionable enough, but all the disadvantages of up and down, were religiously preserved. The idea of avoiding those hills, which they and their ancestors had been accustomed to travel over, seems not to have entered into their plan of reformation." It was a criticism that could equally have been applied a century and half later.

Townsend took some consolation from the fact that "some occasional improvements" had been made, and Ireland finally seemed to be on the verge of a "great alteration" in its transport network.^[27] The early eighteenth century had favoured privately funded toll roads ('turnpikes'). One of the earliest, in 1731, ran northward from Cork to Kilworth, intended as the first stage of the overland journey to Dublin which still took several days. In 1747, a more ambitious project headed north-west to Killarney and Listowel, driving over eighty kilometres of new road through bogs and Boggerahs to bring Kerry into the economic orbit of the emerging regional capital of Cork:^[28] maps of the city's environs still mark Dublin Pike and Kerry Pike. These private enterprise projects were not always financially successful, and Grand Juries (the forerunners of county councils) gradually acquired powers to spend 'county cess' (local rates) on the improvement of highways.^[29] Local initiatives were backed by a central government that needed to move troops quickly and effectively around the country. By the end of the century, there was the additional and more benign incentive behind highway upgrades, to provide the improved postal services that were needed to underpin an increasingly sophisticated commercial economy.^[30] Three successive violent conquests between 1580 and 1690, each followed by seizures of Catholic-owned estates, had created a region dominated by a very small number of landowners, determined to use large-scale communications projects to exploit their estates and powerful enough to impose their demands – a situation diametrically opposed to the Ireland of the twentieth century, where transport priorities emerged from a mosaic of conflicting local interests.   

Here, specifically, we can draw a line across three centuries to one feature of the present-day scandalously ignored Castlemartyr traffic problem, for one of the earliest of the "occasional improvements" hailed by Townsend was the product of a high-handed decision by a landlord who created the sharp bend that complicates access at west end of the main street. According to Charles Smith, Cork's first local historian, "[t]he high road from Cork to Youghall, lay formerly more to the S[outh] and ran by the castles of Ightermurragh, Ballytotis [Ballintotis], &c, of which road there are still several traces": some of these "traces" are used as rat-runs to avoid the village today. Writing in 1750, Smith explained that the main highway had been diverted by Henry Boyle, a powerful eighteenth-century politician "who at great expense has laid out a fine level road", evidently encompassing at least part of the route between Midleton and Castlemartyr.^[31] Boyle, who became the first Earl of Shannon in 1756, was determined to remove through traffic from the grounds of Castlemartyr House, the mansion that he constructed on or close to the site of the former Ballymartyr village. His fine level highway skirted the woodland of the Castlemartyr demesne, joining the original road at the west end of the village street. To underline his 'keep out' message, Lord Shannon blocked the former main road by erecting a fake castellated gateway which a near-contemporary architectural critic dismissed as bad imitation Gothick.^[32] Three hundred years later, poor design is hardly the chief indictment of this eighteenth-century exercise in arrogance: around one thousand trucks a day are forced to navigate Henry Boyle's bend.^[33]

The eighteenth century was perhaps the first period in Ireland's history when an efficient highway network came to be considered as an essential part of national infrastructure. But, for the inhabitants of Youghal, for instance, roads were still a secondary adjunct to the water-borne links to the town's hinterland provided by the Blackwater and the Bride. This explains why , in 1752, Youghal backed a project to open a road over the Knockmealdowns to bring south Tipperary into its economic orbit. In 1764, the Corporation (town council) even voted £50 from local funds "towards completing the New Road from Lismore to Clogheen, by the way of Belough Mountain" – the celebrated road through The Vee that passes the mysterious tarn of Baylough.^[34] It is noteworthy that Youghal was slower to feel an interest in maintaining its road links to Cork: in 1667, its Corporation resisted demands for contributions to the repair of the bridge at Killeagh, and even objected to paying part of the cost of its "new building" eight years later, presumably after the problem structure had collapsed.  It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that Youghal began to value its overland links with the regional capital, successfully lobbying the Grand Jury in 1752 to pay "for repairing the high road from this Town to Killeigh [sic]".^[35] Although the river Dissour was one of the area's lesser streams, it was still capable of disrupting communications. In 1809, the bridge at Killeagh "was completely carried away, and four men and a woman, who were passing at the moment, were hurled into destruction".^[36] Its replacement was destroyed by heavy rain in 1839: local opinion blamed a landlord, Sir A. De Capel Brooke, who had been engaged in 'improvements' on his Aghadoe House estate a kilometre upstream. These included an artificial lake which had overflowed its dam in the deluge. "Three arches were carried away, and agricultural produce to a large amount destroyed."^[37] Until the early nineteenth century, local minor roads were still often neglected. Ireland's first road atlas, published in 1778 – itself significant evidence of the importance of the highway network – described the road from Tallow to Castlemartyr through Mogeely as "not the best or most travelled", the latter comment perhaps being still valid.^[38]

Nonetheless, Townsend was correct in seeing the early nineteenth century as the era of overdue re-planning of the highway system. A major upgrade of Ireland's long-distance road network was undertaken for the government around 1800 by an immigrant entrepreneur, the Scotsman John Anderson. Yet, in the absence of a bridge across the Blackwater at Youghal until 1832, there was still no concept of a south-coast through route. As noted below, when Anderson turned his attentions to communications between Cork and Waterford, he chose a route through Fermoy and Clonmel.^[39] By 1810, regional main roads were coming to the fore, with projects to improve Cork's connectivity – and the mail coach services – to the south-west, north-west and north – but with much less emphasis, at that time, upon the east of the county. A road was "in contemplation" to Bandon and Skibbereen, passing through Innishannon which, two hundred years later, would become a bottleneck almost as vexatious as Castlemartyr. By 1815, carriages were running along a spur road to Kinsale. Another route was planned by way of Macroom and Millstreet into Kerry, while a third would head through Mallow towards Limerick.^[40] For Townsend, these projects were welcome not only because they discarded the cramped highway legacy of the past, but because the new schemes were to be better constructed. There were, he asserted, two major faults with the existing roads. One was poor surfacing, "laying on a thin covering, not of small but large stones, which are always shifting their places, and render the passage extremely rough for carriages, and dangerous for horsemen…. no road can be considered in proper order, that is not thickly covered with coarse gravel, or stones broken to a small and equal size." Mail coaches required even surfaces (just as, a century later, motor vehicles needed tarmac). The other shortcoming was "want of sufficient breadth, in consequence of which carriages, being confined to the same track, soon wear it into ruts". The new roads were to be forty-two feet (12.8 metres) wide, a decision that explains how so much of the inherited network has been able to cope with modern traffic volumes. It may not be that every new main road in County Cork had a 12.8 metre-wide carriageway but, as can be seen from set-back hedgerows, the corridors driven through the landscape contained enough space to widen the Regency highways and so form an ersatz pastiche of a modern transportation system.^[41]

In one of History's strange interconnections, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia would open the way to large-scale highway projects in east Cork. Mount Tamboro on the island of Sumbawa exploded in March 1815 with a force thousand times that of the Icelandic eruption that closed the skies of northern Europe to air traffic for a week in 2020. Ash and sulphate gases were pumped into the stratosphere and spread around the world. The artist J.M.W. Turner painted some weirdly magnificent sunsets, but 1816 became known as the year without a summer. Even in areas where cereal and potato crops struggled into life, they were battered by heavy rain which also drenched the turf supply that the poor relied upon to keep warm. Typhoid spread.^[42] The government responded by financing public works. Unlike the programme that would be funded during the Great Famine of the 'forties, which were mostly localised make-work schemes, the 1816-17 projects were on a larger scale and included a new highway between Youghal and Killeagh. A Belfast newspaper welcomed the news that it was under construction as the project would create employment among the poor "and be such an improvement to that part of the country". The new road superseded an earlier route along the ridge to the north, which had provided overland access to Youghal outside the town's North Gate down a street still called Cork Hill.^[43] While "digging up part of a field, through which the road is to pass", workmen found "a quantity of pikes" – two cartloads in fact – which it was assumed had been buried in 1798.^[44] Entering Youghal from the south, the new route required the replacement of the existing access road into the town, which was "a kind of boreen with high clay fences…. so narrow that two carts could with difficulty pass each other, and then only in some parts of it."^[45] The new approach, the Upper Strand, was praised by a habitually critical tourist in 1834: "I scarcely know any where a finer promenade than the Cork road, just on leaving the town, with the sea directly below the parapet; and commanding views of the strikingly beautiful entrance to the bay, and of the wide ocean beyond."^[46]

Slum clearance was also needed in Youghal itself to connect the new road to the town centre. Prior to 1817, the southern continuation of the main street, Friar Street, ended in a small market place used by milk traders. There was no vehicular access from the strand, and pedestrians were deterred from picking their way through "a melee of poor cottages, inhabited chiefly by brogue-makers" who did not welcome strangers. Their mini-suburb, locally nicknamed "Hell", was destroyed to make way for stagecoaches.^[47] Even so, a bottleneck remained between the two projects. Almost a century later, in 1910, there were complaints that a 220-metre stretch of road between the Loretto convent and the lighthouse, "the only approach to the southern end of the town" and "the principal highway between Cork and Waterford", was so narrow that two motor cars could hardly pass.^[48]

In terms of the job it was required to do (and the qualification is important), the highway system across eighteenth-century Munster performed relatively well. One persuasive proof of this is the unchallengeable ascendancy of Cork as the regional capital. As a general rule, in the age before the railways, it was cheaper to move bulk goods by water than by land.^[49] Waterford and Youghal were both located on the estuaries of navigable river systems that extended far inland, while small craft could transfer cargo a short distance upstream from Kinsale to within five kilometres of Bandon. Yet it was Cork that outstripped all its rivals even though the city depended largely on its overland communications.^[50] The city had major advantages for shipping – its deep and sheltered outer harbour and long river frontages that provided wharf space along the two branches of the Lee – but it had no water-borne access to its hinterland. The location of its butter markets on the north side indicated that it had attracted the trade from the central Blackwater valley that we might have expected to have been floated down to Youghal. By the late-eighteenth century, Cork was exporting thirty times as much butter as its smaller rival.^[51] Even the hinterland of Youghal, east Cork's prime agricultural district, looked west to the regional capital: Townsend noted that commercial dairymen between Midleton and Youghal also fattened young livestock, so that the city was "abundantly supplied with veal of very fine quality from Imokilly and part of Barrymore". It is not surprising that he described the road from Youghal to Cork as "one of the best and most level in the county", adding that the roads in Imokilly were "generally very good".^[52] And that was before the 1817 upgrade east of Killeagh. An early attempt to promote a railway from Cork to Midleton and Youghal claimed in 1845 that "[t]he passenger traffic on the existing road is not surpassed on many in this kingdom".^[53] 

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Ireland was subjected to the attentions both of collectors of Useful Knowledge and of literary tourists who travelled from Britain with the intention of turning an honest penny by churning out light-hearted books about Paddy's Land and its quaint inhabitants. Although steamboats and railways made the country more accessible from the mid-century, the Famine would undercut the appeal of these gentle caricatures, although the demographic tragedy gave renewed impetus to the determination of the more serious minded to count and classify the people who remained. One negative common feature of both these early nineteenth-century types of publication is that they made very little comment on the state of Ireland's roads. Samuel Lewis stuffed his Topographical Dictionary of 1837 with figures and facts, but only occasionally mentioned the highways.^[54] The literary tourists Mr and Mrs S.C. Hall and the novelist W.M. Thackeray, who travelled the country five years later, had much to say about the scenery of Ireland and the poverty of its people, but their descriptions of journeys by stagecoach and jaunting car seem never to mention – let alone condemn – the quality of the highways upon which they travelled. Henry Inglis, a scientific observer with an itch for travel, did briefly note in 1834 that "better roads" were part of a picture of Ireland as "an improving country", but he wondered why such box-ticking indications of national progress were not reflected in the condition of the people.^[55] A few visitors were positively enthusiastic. "There are few things in Ireland, which astonish a stranger more than the magnificence of its many excellent roads," wrote Edward Wakefield in 1812, who felt that they were "justly celebrated for the excellence of their construction".^[56] Subsequently an occasional English guide book would concede that Ireland's roads were "very well kept"^[57] but, overall, we have to assume that both the visitors and the inquisitors took for granted that the Irish highway system was more than adequate for the needs of the country. No doubt this was true, in an era of farm waggons, jaunting cars and the occasional stagecoach. There were, of course, limitations to the network's capacity. Exploring west Cork in 1842, Thackeray was overtaken by the express service provided by a stagecoach called 'The Skibbereen Industry': it travelled at seven miles per hour.^[58]

It is also worth noting that this explosion of road-building took place in the century before the Great Famine of 1845-9: the new highway from Killongford bridge via Kinsalebeg to the new Blackwater crossing in 1832, the foundation of the modern N25 between Dungarvan and Youghal, was one of the last large projects. It is sad that this creative period of problem-solving in the field of transportation would be so totally forgotten, for it might have inspired twentieth-century planners with an energetic determination to emulate the achievements of the past. Instead, wherever a straight highway cuts through the landscape, local tradition tends to label it as a 'Famine road' even though it may be, as in the case of the still-extant sections of the Kerry turnpike, as much as one hundred years older. In a savage but little-noticed paradox, the modernising programme of road-building may even have contributed to the intensity of suffering in the eighteen-forties. One reason why it was relatively easy to construct new highways was that they encountered few inhabitants or physical obstacles when they were driven through rough terrain, like Waterford's Drum Hills in 1832, "a country just emerging from a barren and unproductive state".^[59] New highways facilitated the enclosure of wild landscape, usually for commercial cattle-raising aimed at the export trade to England. The loss of what was regarded as common land, and the process that triggered resistance movements such as the Whiteboys, Rightboys and Rockites over the decades. However, 'mountainy' people survived and their numbers rapidly increased because the improved road network enabled them to cart sand and kelp (seaweed) from the beaches up to thirty kilometres inland, fertilising the cultivation of potatoes in the reclaimed areas. At Kilmacthomas in the summer of 1842, Thackeray noted that the road was "covered with carts of seaweed, which the people were bringing for manure from the shore some four miles distant".^[60] Country people living on marginal land were not simply over-reliant upon the potato, but had become dangerously dependent on the supply of natural fertiliser to grow it that the improved road system had made possible. Ireland had endured famines before, but never were so many people vulnerable to the collapse of a single foodstuff as happened in the Hungry Forties.^[61]

The tragic extent of the disaster helps explain why the make-work relief projects commissioned from the summer of 1846 were generally on a much smaller and localised scale than earlier highway schemes. An unusually long stretch of the future N25 put out for repair was the 5.63 kilometres between Tinnalyra and Summerhill in County Waterford (roughly, from Grange church to the Whiting Bay turn-off near Pilltown) – and here the original contractor defaulted on the work.^[62] The sum of £120 allocated to widen the road between Youghal and Killeagh was obviously enough only to tackle a short section of the highway: indeed, the County Engineer explained that the money was voted "at the desire of the Relief Committee of Youghal to meet the exigencies of the town" – in other words, to remove starving refugees who had flooded in from the countryside. Similarly, the £150 "granted to lower a hill and fill a hollow on the road from Youghal to Killeagh between Mr. Fisher's cottage and Jeremiah Cashman's house" could hardly have been a major project, and cannot now be traced. However, a more generously funded scheme, £300 "[t]o lower the hills on the road from Cork to Youghal, between Castlemartyr and Ballindina", can be identified. About a kilometre east of Castlemartyr, N25 traffic speeds over a slight rise, with a steep bank of woodland on the south side of the road. It was here in the autumn of 1846 that hungry men wielded picks, shovelled earth and pushed wheelbarrows to effect a small improvement that nowadays nobody notices.^[63]

A South Coast Route? The modern N25 covers over 180 kilometres from the Rosslare Europort to Dunkettle, on the outskirts of Cork City. In mid-2026, less than one-third of its route – about fifty kilometres – is dual carriageway. These are the sections from Dunkettle to Midleton's Lakeview roundabout, sometimes grandiosely called the East Cork Parkway, completed in 2003, and parts of the Waterford northern bypass, opened in 2009, and its New Ross counterpart which followed in 2020. The two latter projects both include handsome bridges, a reminder that Munster's broad rivers were a challenging obstacle to the concept of a south-coast through route. It is obvious that highway engineering has faced – and still faces – a major challenge in catching up with contemporary traffic needs on this artery of national importance.^[64] One historical dimension of this patchwork that is worth exploring is that the very slow emergence of even the notion of a continuous road linking the cities of Waterford and Cork by way of Dungarvan, Youghal and Midleton, with concomitant implications for wayside settlements such as Castlemartyr and Killeagh.

The slow development of long-distance overland communications certainly did not mean that there was no south-coast trade. Most cargo went by sea, in relatively short-range voyages that do not show up in records such as customs returns: their owners relied upon local information networks to provide custom and did not need to advertise sailings in the press. Nonetheless, such scraps of evidence as survive point to a thriving coastal trade: 105 vessels from other Munster ports visited Cork in 1698, and those numbers almost certainly grew. Nor was activity confined to short voyages along the nearby coastline. Nowadays, Dungarvan is not a commercial port but, from the seventeen-twenties, it supplied Dublin with potatoes, later adding other specialised cargoes such as cider. Midleton's rise as a brewing and distilling centre owed much to its access to Cork Harbour through its satellite port, Ballinacurra.^[65]

Unfortunately, the river estuaries which gave access to the interior and facilitated coastal trade also constituted intimidating barriers to east-west travellers on dry land. In any case, Dungarvan and Youghal did not necessarily offer the shortest and most convenient route between Waterford and Cork. Around 1790, the Waterford Grand Jury invested nearly £10,000 in 67 kilometres of new road from the city to the county bounds west of Tallow – the modern N25 and N72 main highways. Backed by the county's largest landowner, the Marquess of Waterford, the project shortened the route to Cork by feeding traffic onward through Rathcormack to the Munster metropolis.^[66] The route made sense: it traversed the inland valley from the environs of Dungarvan to Cappoquin, avoiding major rivers and benefiting from the handsome bridge over the Blackwater at Lismore that had been erected in the seventeen-seventies. An additional advantage was probably that it improved stagecoach access to Mallow, a spa town much patronised as a holiday centre by the nobility and gentry. A major upgrade of Ireland's arterial road network was undertaken for the government around 1800 by an immigrant entrepreneur, the Scotsman John Anderson. It was hardly surprising that he attempted to channel Cork-to-Waterford traffic through Fermoy, his own urban experiment, but he sought to complete the link between the two south-coast cities through an even wider loop that took in Clonmel. Although the Post Office required mail coaches to call at Dungarvan and Youghal from 1828, the northerly route continued to cater for tourists. Thackeray travelled that way in 1842, and experienced in Lismore one of the most chilling moments in his Irish tour. "A little old disreputable man in tatters, with a large steeple of a hat" was pointed out to him as the father of a murderer who had been hanged at Clonmel the previous day. The novelist stared at him "with wonderful interest".^[67]

Bridges were necessary to make a reality of the route linking the towns along the Munster coast– and big bridges too. In 1794, the American engineer Lemuel Cox sank trestles into the bed of the Suir to act as foundations for Waterford's first bridge, a device that gave it the nickname "Timbertoes". Two years later, Cox also crossed the Barrow: his New Ross bridge was a recent feature when it became the focus for desperate and bloody street fighting in 1798. A modern observer might feel that the Colligan at Dungarvan ought to have been a minor obstacle, but it took a decade to produce the unspectacular single-arched Causeway Bridge. The clue to the problem is in the name. Nowadays, the eastern approach from Abbeyside runs through an attractive public park. But, in 1804, when the Waterford Grand Jury refused to touch the scheme, this was slob, which would have to be crossed by a high and wide dyke. The Duke of Devonshire, the town's landlord, took on the project in 1809, but a partial collapse of the causeway four years later delayed completion until 1816. The bridge reportedly cost His Grace £40,000 and, since his motive was to reinforce his political grip on the town and so dictate the election of its member of parliament, he did not think it prudent to recoup his outlay by charging tolls.^[68] Another small link in the south-coast chain was completed in 1819, with a major upgrade of the highway from Youghal to Tallow, probably another scheme funded as part of the Indonesian volcano relief programme. This included a new bridge over the Tourig, a tributary of the Blackwater, at Rhincrew.^[69]  The Stone Bridge, as it is still known locally, only became part of the Waterford-to-Cork main road when the third Youghal bridge required a realignment of the main road in 1963, but the two-kilometre link road across the Mudlands north of the town became part of the access to the first bridge when it opened in 1832.

In terms of long-distance south-coast highway communication, everything depended on closing the gap at the Blackwater estuary. Without a bridge, as one historical geographer has put it, "Youghal remained in a cul-de-sac".^[70] The town pushed the project forward in 1827-8, commissioning an engineer to make a preliminary report, which including the recommendation of a site, and securing the necessary act of parliament.^[71] The British Post Office backed the project, presumably so that the mail could reach Dungarvan, Youghal and Midleton. In November 1828, "the Cork and Waterford Mail Coach commenced travelling by the Youghal Ferry, (where a six oared boat, for the convenience of passengers, is now stationed by order of the Postmaster General)". This sounds like the grandparent of the modern Ro-Ro ferries: presumably it only operated in calm conditions, since a fully loaded stagecoach would hardly have been a stable cargo even on a large rowing boat. The Ferry Point route cut 21 kilometres from the journey between the two Munster cities, and was specifically intended "as a preliminary step to the erection of a bridge over the Blackwater at Youghal".^[72] The bridge opened on 23 January 1832,^[73] although – sad to say – this by no means marked the end of the Blackwater crossing saga.

The construction of the first Youghal bridge triggered the last major burst of new road construction on the line of the proto-N25. Most of it was on the Waterford side of the Blackwater, but the bridge commissioners (as the management company was styled) put in a kilometre-long spur from the 1819 road to Tallow to approach the bridge from the west, much of it causeway across estuarine mud. Some of this still exists, as the access road to a land-fill site, and the remainder can be traced along the slob bank beyond. Money was in short supply for the bridge project, and it is clear that the commissioners did not build to the 12.8-metre width that Townsend had hailed two decades earlier. East of the bridge, they also constructed and accepted responsibility for the maintenance of about five kilometres of new highway that connected with the existing Ferry Point-focused network.^[74] The first 600 metres from the Bridge House would be a challenge even to modern construction engineers with powerful machinery. The new line of road ran alongside the slob and had to be cut into a steep hillside. Not surprisingly, it was narrow – as it still is. But the rest of the new highway was hardly wider and, in 2005-6, 2.6 kilometres was widened in the Kinsalebeg upgrade. Shortage of cash also restricted the ability of the commissioners to fund repairs. "The road at the County Waterford side of the bridge of Youghal is kept in a very wretched state," a local newspaper complained three years after it had opened, although the complaint may simply reflect the success of the new crossing in attracting traffic.^[75]

The intention of the bridge commissioners to create a link into the existing County Waterford road network was quickly overtaken by an initiative which may have originated with the ratepayers of Dungarvan. Early in 1831, there were reports of a plan to construct an entirely new road from Killongford bridge, which crosses the river Brickey two kilometres south-west of Dungarvan, over "Slievegrine mountain" (the Drum Hills) to Kinsalebeg, where it would meet with the road to Youghal bridge. The Waterford Mirror strongly endorsed the scheme. Although the new line would be only reduce the journey by two miles (3.2 kilometres), it would be of advantage to the inhabitants of Ardmore and Grange since "the present road through the Old Parish [An Seanphobal] is too circuitous for the people residing in those Parishes to go to Dungarvan, and the road through the Old Parish is only of service to the people of that immediate neighbourhood, and is not the direct or shortest line". Striking out boldly in a new direction would open up a stretch of "uncultivated country" which was "merely requiring such encouragements to render it a valuable soil. We perfectly concur in the propriety and public utility of making new roads in preference to throwing away money in repairing the bad old ones."^[76]

It may be useful briefly to pause here to note that this survey has unearthed what we might call the bones of much of the present-day N25 between Waterford and Cork. Henry Boyle, first Earl of Shannon replaced the old road from Midleton with a more northerly highway, to keep the peasantry away from his handsome new mansion, a relocation that cursed the main street of Castlemartyr with an awkward bend. At the eastern end, the highway from the city of Waterford to the environs of Dungarvan owes its origin to a new line of road cut around 1790 that continued to Cork via Cappoquin and Rathcormack. The section from Killeagh to Youghal was driven through what was probably still a largely unenclosed landscape in 1817, and owes its origin to a volcanic eruption in Indonesia. The road over County Waterford's Drum Hills from Killongford bridge to Youghal dates from 1832 and was intended to link with the new Blackwater crossing. No doubt further explorations of archives and newspapers would reveal similar projects, especially between Cork and Midleton.^[77]

Youghal bridge and the south-coast highway Obviously, crossing the Blackwater was the key moment in the creation of a continuous highway between Cork and Waterford through Midleton and Youghal, and the opening of the bridge in 1832 should have marked the completion of the through route. Unfortunately, the story did not end happily ever after, and it would be 130 years before there was a secure and permanent link in this last piece of the chain. The bridge, which cost about £21,000, was the product of public spirit rather than public enterprise. Almost half the money was raised by the sale of debentures within the local community: the investors never received a penny in return. A government loan fund advanced £8,300 and the shortfall, of about £3,000, was covered by short-term borrowing: in the early years of operation, repayments were a burden on the income from bridge tolls. The timber structure was built from Baltic pine, on which there was a high import duty. This added about £5,000 to the cost, swallowing most of the government loan which, we may note with some satisfaction, was never repaid. To prevent local vested interests from blocking the necessary legislation, the bridge commissioners were not only compelled to operate the town's ferry – which they might well have pleaded was now redundant – but forced to pay a rent of £400 a year for the privilege, a sum that they could never recoup. They were also responsible for the upkeep of the five kilometres of specially constructed approach roads, "though these roads were largely used for other purposes than approaches to the bridge". 

The original plan had envisaged the progressive replacement of the timber supports with masonry pillars but, even in good times, the bridge did not generate enough income to make this possible. By the late eighteen-thirties, the combined bridge and ferry tolls netted about £950 a year, a poor enough return. After deducting the £400 extorted for the ferry and a small amount for administrative expenses, about £320 was available for maintenance. By 1848, the structure needed major repairs, but the economic dislocation caused by the Famine further reduced income from tolls. The town of Youghal resumed responsibility for operating the ferry, and the bridge itself was leased to sub-contractors. For a time it was run by Sir Joseph McKenna, a wealthy financier who lived at Ardoginna House, now a spectacular ruin on the cliffs near Youghal. McKenna repaired the bridge "and opened it free to all passers", a gesture that helped his election as member of parliament for Youghal in 1865. His generosity did nothing to resolve the structure's fundamental financial problems. Eventually, in 1878, the Grand Juries of Cork and Waterford agreed to construct a new iron bridge alongside the rotting timber structure. It took three and a half years to build, and opened on 7 March 1883.^[78]

Once again, a Youghal bridge project was unlucky in its timing. If the original timber structure had survived for another twenty years, it would almost certainly have been reconstructed in steel, like the impressive railway bridge over the Barrow on the Waterford-to-Rosslare line which opened in 1906. Unfortunately, wrought iron was used to build the second Youghal bridge, and within forty years there were worrying signs of corrosion. In 1928, Waterford County Council imposed weight limits on vehicles using the bridge. Eleven years later, lorries were banned outright. Barriers were placed on the carriageway to slow cars, while passengers using long-distance public transport were required to disembark on one side of the river, carry their luggage across and board another coach on the other. Major projects were impossible during the Second World War and the years of austerity that followed. Ireland was poor and motor traffic remained sparse. In 1952, a local newspaper complained that the bridge had been "in a dangerous condition for years and serves little useful purpose in its present".^[79] Nonetheless, Youghal shopkeepers pressed for the repair of the existing structure, fearing that any replacement further from the town would hurt their trade – an objection hard to comprehend given that a bypass lay half a century in the uncertain future. Planners in the Department of Local Government favoured the construction of a new bridge (the third) a short distance upstream, between Rhincrew and Ardsallagh, where the Blackwater was much narrower – a site that had been rejected in 1827 as the river bed was too deep for conventional piling and the alternative of a suspension bridge too expensive. The clinching argument for the Ardsallagh site, which was adopted in 1956, was expert assessment that the underlying geology would provide a firm underpinning for the planned concrete bridge.  Unfortunately, when excavations began, the contractors could not locate solid rock at the predicted depth. As the challenge of digging the foundations grew, so did the cost and the timeline. By the time the bridge was completed in January 1963, it was locally nicknamed the Eighth Wonder of the World. The Minister of Transport, the Donegal-based Neil Blaney, blamed "a sudden attack of influenza" for his absence from the ribbon-cutting ceremony, but he did send a message describing the road between Waterford and Cork as "one of the most important national arteries".^[80]  In reality, with successive Youghal bridges underperforming for almost half of the century and a quarter of their existence, the notion of a south-coast through route remained hazy and lacking in development.^[81]

From stagecoach to train Despite the century-long uncertainties that would threaten the Blackwater crossing, the opening of the first Youghal bridge did at least bring the east Cork main road into the stagecoach era. By 1837, there were "several stage coaches every day" through Youghal. Of these, the most important was the Royal Mail from Waterford to Cork, which also called at Kilmacthomas and Dungarvan, with a detour to Clashmore, and then on to Castlemartyr and Midleton. It clipped along at thirteen kilometres an hour. The curmudgeonly Scottish intellectual Thomas Carlyle used staccato prose to capture the atmosphere of the stagecoach heading out of Youghal, a town whose swarms of beggars he was glad to leave behind: the coach finally escaped the "rough miscellany, all or most of them however to rear of me. … Crack, crack, through Clockgate … westward, sight of sea and ships on left … fairly up, out of dingy Youghal; Cable [Capel] Island rises clear on the left, amid clear sea, in the windy summer sunshine; and we are fairly whirling on".^[82] In 1837, Castlemartyr had "a small inn, where cars can be hired", presumably so that tourists could visit the nearby coast. By 1865, there were two inns at Castlemartyr, although only one had the kind of fancy sign that a visitor from Britain would recognise as the hallmark of a respectable hostelry. There was also an inn at Killeagh, probably another small-scale venture.^[83] The pattern for the future was set, efficient stretches of highway linking town to town or roadside village, with frequent stops to change relays of horses and provide travellers with food and facilities. It is unlikely that the long-distance passing trade made much contribution to Castlemartyr's village economy, nor would the smattering of traffic so generated have caused serious congestion in the main street. All of this would change when the inherited network was made to support a modern industrial economy.

East Cork belatedly entered the long-distance road transport era shortly before the stagecoach was supplanted by the train. The railway from Dublin reached Blackpool, on the outskirts of Cork, in October 1849, although it needed a further five years of tunnelling to carry passengers and freight into the city centre. The Cork-Midleton line opened in 1859, and reached Youghal the following year. But, once again, Youghal became a cul-de-sac for, despite various optimistic schemes to press on to the east, the Blackwater estuary proved too great a barrier to the train. As with the 1790 Grand Jury road to Tallow, Waterford and Cork were finally linked, in 1878, by a circuitous route that left the main line at Fermoy and wound its way through Lismore and Dungarvan: in 2017, its former eastern section became the Waterford greenway. The train did not always dramatically improve passenger connectivity in the countryside: in 1875, there were services from Mogeely station to and from Cork and Youghal three times a day.^[84] But there can be no doubt that Victorian Ireland channelled its communications ambitions – and particularly the movement of freight – into railways, and construction continued into the early twentieth century. When the port of Rosslare opened in 1906, it was linked to Waterford by a new line, which included the longest railway bridge in the country, a 650-metre structure across the Barrow.^[85] (In its early decades, Rosslare specialised in moving people and cattle, and rail was usually preferable to road for both.) In the century before the Famine, a network of medieval cattle tracks had been taken by the scruff of the neck and upgraded to support a horse-drawn transport system. When we fast-forward a century and a half, we shall observe how those bucolic highways were impacted by the shock of the motor vehicle. In an ironic twist, Ireland would rediscover its taken-for-granted road network and just the point where the railways inherited from Victorian times were weakened by underinvestment and retreating through an inexorable process of branch-line closures.

The dominance of railways from the mid-nineteenth century was accompanied by the near-total fossilisation of the road network.  "The average main road is very bumpy wherever there is heavy traffic," an early guide for motorists warned in 1902.^[86] Even basic maintenance was a losing battle, and mending highways certainly did not offer a prestigious career.^[87] Local newspapers carried advertisements inviting tenders for repairs of short sections. The result was a roads programme that was disjointed and haphazard. A few east Cork examples may sketch the story. In 1843, a "road-jobber" hired to tackle part of the road between Midleton and Castlemartyr either misunderstood or disobeyed his instructions. "The consequence was, that the elevation of the road was raised from one foot in eighteen to one foot in thirteen."^[88] (This may have been one of the bumps removed by pick-and-shovel relief projects between 1846 and 1849, for there is no steep hill on that section of the N25 today.) But the road repairers themselves could be victims of an inefficient system. In 1856 a contractor took on a three-year responsibility for the highway between Loughaderra and Killeagh, budgeting his tender on the stated length of 7.1 kilometres. He subsequently discovered that the stretch of road was actually 8.5 kilometres long. The local magistrates, who oversaw the work, agreed that he had a case for more cash but were not sure how to compensate him. In the winter of 1859-60, as the Cork to Youghal railway was under construction, the company used the future N25 to move heavy equipment into place, and the indignant highway contractors demanded compensation for their additional repair costs. One problem in this episode was that most of the magistrates had done their duty as local worthies and invested in the railway project, just as their counterparts a generation earlier had subscribed to debentures to raise funds for the first Youghal bridge. Eventually, the disputes were remitted to an official, the county surveyor, for arbitration.^[89]   Railways had moved centre-stage and highways policy essentially became a matter of jogging slowly to stand still.

Yet the overall story of unenterprising neglect is relieved by one major advance, an innovation that has been unaccountably ignored by historians – in Britain as well as Ireland. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, urban streets, major highways and – eventually – most minor byways were covered with hard surfaces – asphalt, bitumen, tar – bringing about a notable change in the landscape, and one with huge implications for the potential of road transport. Without tarmac, Ireland's roads could hardly have supported the traffic generated by a factory economy.  In Munster, the process began in Cork city, and may perhaps be dated to an appeal from a patriotic citizen in 1908, who wished to emulate improvements in Dublin – always a potent argument in the southern capital: "if Patrick Street and the Grand Parade, being the two principal streets our city, were dealt with as a beginning it would add new enchantment and improvement which would be beneficial and everlasting."^[90] By 1913, the process had moved to humbler downtown thoroughfares such as Princes Street and Marlborough Street.^[91] Asphalt was regarded as "suitable for roads carrying light traffic traffic, and for country roads, as it afforded a good foothold for horses, and gives excellent wearing results".^[92] It was imported from a volcanic lake in Trinidad, and processed at a plant on the city's Albert Quay.^[93] The work was resumed in 1919, and it is striking to reflect that we have vivid images of Cork during the War of Independence but apparently no awareness of the major transformation that was overtaking the city's streets at that time.

Tarring was not completely unknown outside the towns: as early as the eighteen-eighties, the carriageway on Youghal bridge was asphalted, presumably to provide a continuous surface over planking. By 1913, the asphalt on the bridge needed renewal, but the expenditure was defended as "an item that would not come up again for probably 40 years".^[94] But when, in 1913, Youghal Rural District Council decided to tackle 1.35 kilometres of the Tallow road as far as the Stone Bridge at Rhincrew, the project involved the older method, which used steam-rollers to crush the gravel and compress it into a firm surface.^[95] The tarring of the Cork-to-Waterford highway (the future N25) seems to have happened soon after 1926, when the road was included in Free State government projects.  By this time, contractors seem to have been generally using coal tar, a prolific by-product from the manufacture of gas: almost every small town in Ireland had its local gas works. In 1928, the Blackwater Conservators complained to the two county councils of "serious injury caused to fish life by road washings impregnated with tar", and demanded the use of a more durable but also more expensive product, bitumen.^[96]  A spokesman for the gas industry subsequently admitted that run-off from coal tar poisoned fish, but he blamed "the damp nature of the country and the proximity of the various rivers to the roads" – in short, it was the fault of the rivers for flowing in the wrong places.^[97]

Unfortunately, the tarmac revolution accompanied a major shift in the political culture of local government. The grand juries were ad hoc panels of prosperous ratepayers, who hired contractors to maintain the roads in a cheap and efficient manner, although – as noted above – the second aim sometimes fell behind the first. In 1898, the old system was replaced by elected county councils, most of which established direct-labour highways departments, hiring labourers in what became the equivalent of a permanent Famine relief scheme.^[98] At county level, the highways budget was informally split among the elected councillors, who built up local vote banks by ensuring that roads in their own communities were well maintained while tar-and-bucket jobs were handed out to needy neighbours. In the days of gravel roads, local people probably took the initiative in dealing with minor problems, filling holes with stones gathered from the fields and raking over ruts. By contrast, once the roads were tarred, Council employees were needed to mend the potholes. Patrick McGilligan, Finance Minister in the first Interparty government, described the process in an acerbic memorandum in 1950: "the price of a quiet life for the County Engineer is to ensure that a given fraction of every appropriation for roads is spent in the residential area of each Councillor and that in its spending the maximum amount is laid out in wages payable to the County Councillor's neighbours. … The present system of road making and road maintenance is specially designed to make both operations as expensive as possible, because roadwork in rural Ireland has become indissolubly linked with relief works in the minds of all members of Local Authorities."^[99] McGilligan would have liked to centralise all aspects of highways policy but this, as east Cork well knows, would have distorted priorities through the prism of a Dublin perspective. As late as the nineteen-eighties, Ireland had the worst main-road system in western Europe – but it topped the league table for the greatest density of maintained side roads.^[100] Such practices did nothing to encourage the development of a well-equipped construction sector ready to tackle major projects. In any case, pressure for such initiatives had been slow to develop. Independent Ireland was relatively slow to enter the motor vehicle age, and fuel shortages during the Emergency of 1939-45 drove most cars off the road. In 1945, there were fewer than 8,000 registered motor vehicles across the Twenty Six Counties^[101] – although it should always be remembered that, throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, Irish horse-power was mostly generated by horses.

1942-1983: Transport Infrastructure Invisible  Remarkably, between 1942 and 1944, civil servants planning for the post-war world drafted visionary plans for "the reconstruction of the country's arterial highways": bypasses would eliminate bottlenecks and new intercity routes would allow traffic to reach speeds of 120 kph. The mere existence of such schemes on paper throws some doubt upon the temptation to distrust the distant and uncaring monster of 'Dublin', even though it should be noted that these imaginative bureaucrats envisaged giving priority to the congestion in Swords, Santry and Stillorgan: on the banks of the Liffey, utopia perennially jostled with myopia. Unfortunately, given the poverty of the State and urgent demands in sectors such as housing and healthcare, there was never much chance of these highway schemes becoming a reality. As Tom Garvin noted, "whenever governments were desperate for funds, which was pretty well all the time, the 'Road Fund' was raided". Perhaps more remarkable was that politicians regarded the very idea of improving Ireland's roads not as a discussion of infrastructural needs but as an expression of privileged selfishness. When he became Taoiseach in 1948, John A. Costello cancelled all plans for a modern highway system with the comment that he did not intend to build racetracks for plutocrats.^[102] His mindset was hardly unique. Commenting in 1952 on the fact that 31,000 lorries were operating in the State – 20,000 more than in 1939 – Senator Joseph Johnston complained that there were "a great many people producing superfluous transport services". He favoured punitive taxation "to diminish the total number of lorries on the road, and especially the heavy motor-lorries", arguing (perhaps optimistically) "that the people so engaged will find some more useful occupation from the country's point of view in some other industry". More specifically, he favoured "the use of the big stick of penalisation to keep these heavy lorries off the road that get in my way every time I try to use the Naas road".^[103] Although he talked like a backwoodsman, Johnston was Professor of Applied Economics at Trinity, regarded as having special insight into the problems of agriculture. It is not clear how he expected farmers to market their produce.

Official thinking similarly regarded road haulage as a sideshow. In 1945, the government established CIÉ, originally as a semi-State company but, from 1950, as a publicly-owned corporation.^[104] It is well known that CIÉ took control of Ireland's rail and bus services, but not generally remembered that it was intended to dominate road freight as well.^[105] Indeed, private operators were banned from driving their lorries across county boundaries, a restriction so absurd that it could not be enforced. Although the system of government seemed determined not to acknowledge the fact, vehicle ownership increased rapidly in the post-war period, to the point where even the most arthritic planning system had to consider at least some road improvements. In 1950, plans were announced for a 19.3-kilometre dual carriageway between Dublin and Bray.^[106] The scheme collapsed in a welter of denunciation. There was predictable resentment around the country at the expenditure of so much money in the capital region, while Dubliners certainly did not regard the Wicklow seaside town as a deprived area deserving of preferential treatment. It was pointed out that the problems on the road to Bray were mainly caused by suburban and holiday traffic, and that there would be greater economic benefit in tackling other major routes – Professor Johnston was not alone in his frustration with the Naas road. "The scheme springs from a new form of vanity in this country," a Dublin journalist informed readers of a Belfast newspaper. "If anyone says that another country (even if it is ten times our size) has something that we have not, we set about getting it at any price."^[107] Unfortunately, the reverse was also true: policy-makers seemed to obstruct change for the fun of it.^[108] 

It was against this background of boreens and begrudgery that Ireland began to industrialise. The conventional narrative tells how Seán Lemass became Taoiseach in 1959 determined to abandon the 'ourselves-alone' fortress economics of the de Valera years that had produced only stagnation, emigration and despair. In partnership with T.K. Whitaker, a new-generation civil servant at the head at the Department of Finance, Lemass opened Ireland to foreign investors and their job-creating factories. The true story is more complicated: for instance, the first Inter-Party government had created the Industrial Development Authority a decade earlier.^[109] Youghal had acquired a textile factory in 1947, thanks to the gift of a site by the local council, and carpet manufacture began there in 1954. The Lemass-Whitaker initiative is best seen as a form of stocktaking that reviewed and encouraged a process that was already under way. However, the point to be made in this context is that policy-makers endorsed a shift towards manufacturing without giving any consideration to the road network that would be needed to transport the goods produced. This was all the more noteworthy because the counterpart of industrialisation – if rarely emphasised – was decentralisation: factory jobs were intended to prevent the ossification of the regions and the decay of the smaller towns. In what may seem a bizarre location, in 1958 a German company that manufactured cranes – and very large cranes too – opened a plant in Killarney, over one hundred kilometres from the country's only steelworks, at Haulbowline on Cork Harbour, and almost fifty kilometres from the closest export outlet, the small Kerry port of Fenit. Impressively, two-thirds of a century later, Liebherr still produces dockside container cranes at its Killarney factory, although they are shipped out in sections.^[110]

There was even a bizarre sense that the omission of any emphasis upon highway improvement was a necessary precondition to publicly funded industrialisation. Ireland was a poor country and money for subsidies and tax holidays could only be found by cuts in other areas. In an influential memorandum of December 1957, Whitaker argued for the diversion of funds from "unproductive investment" on roads and hospitals to "productive" sectors that would stimulate the economy.^[111] Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that decisions were taken about specific problems within a series of tunnels that never interconnected: worse still, those decisions were often made by the same small group of people, politicians and bureaucrats, who responded to challenges by resolving to do nothing. It should have been obvious – as some dissidents did indeed point out – that the creation of the skilled labour force necessary for factory work required massive improvements to secondary education and technical training. Sadly, any government intervention in the schools risked conflict with the Catholic Church, which not only controlled the schools but staffed them on the cheap. Perhaps education was a special case that justified a measure of cowardice, but the crozier was not the only barrier to modernisation. Many policy-makers simply did not comprehend the basic needs of the twentieth-century world.

For example, in 1958, a civil servant, inspired by a Whitakerised sense of priorities, argued that "the extension of telephone services will mean the diversion of capital to something that is mainly a convenience".^[112] In most small towns in the 'fifties, businesses (and not all of them) advertised two-digit phone numbers, since there were rarely more than one hundred subscribers on any exchange. It was widely assumed that politicians deliberately restricted the supply of telephones in order to allocate them to favoured supporters and thereby strengthen their electoral base. Few people in modern Ireland will recall the frustrations of waiting to be connected to the phone network if the applicant had no access to political influence. Nonetheless, the telephone famine created a distrust of politicians that pervades public attitudes to issues such as the Castlemartyr bypass today. Perhaps the most cock-eyed example of a lack of joined-up thinking was the absurdity that the drive to industrialise coincided with a closure of railway lines. In 1963, at the height of Youghal's industrial revolution, still dimly recalled in the town as a golden age of prosperity and full employment, passenger trains to Cork were withdrawn, leaving Killeagh, Mogeely (for Castlemartyr) and Midleton similarly dependent upon bus services. Freight trains continued to run for another twenty years, mostly carrying sugar beet to the factory at Mallow at harvest time.^[113] The railway is an excellent device for moving bulk goods from A to B, but a manufacturing economy needs to distribute its products from C to every letter in the alphabet – and beyond. By the nineteen-sixties, network flexibility gave road haulage an unbeatable advantage over the train. One indication of this was the incorporation of a North American term into popular vocabulary. The lumbering lorry loaded with bales of hay or bags of coal was superseded in the public mind by the truck, efficient, powerful and – above all – frighteningly large. 

Rocky roads to Dublin Belatedly (as ever), a few highways were upgraded in the 'sixties and 'seventies, but these improvements fell far short of creating a smooth national transport system. Town-centre shopkeepers remained vocally dedicated to the preservation of the 'passing trade', the assumption that long-distance travellers would be suddenly seized by the desire to buy a bag of onions or a pack of fags and impelled to pull over in the next crowded, crawling main street and spend their money. (Given the country's addiction to tobacco, the second contingency was indeed possible.) In Ireland, as elsewhere, it would take time for traders to appreciate the commercial advantages of quieter town centres. Thus the pioneer racetrack to take plutocrats out of Dublin that opened in 1963 simply funnelled traffic into the middle of Naas. East Cork's first (and, for a long time, only) dual carriageway similarly reduced the journey time between the gridlock of Midleton's Main Street and the interminable strip-city of downtown Carrigtohill. Nor were these short highways constructed to freeway standards, since they were criss-crossed by side roads. Britain acquired its first 13-kilometre stretch of motorway in 1958, a generation after Germany's autobahns and America's freeways. The following year, the M1 provided an uninterrupted fast route most of the way between London and Birmingham. Ireland followed exactly a quarter of a century later, with an eight kilometre motorway that finally skirted Naas. Only in 2003 did it become possible to drive any long distance by motorway, Dublin to Dundalk being linked by the first long stretch of high-speed road in the State.

The massively delayed response in highway engineering was all the more remarkable, given that industrialisation was accompanied by two related developments of seismic significance, Europeanisation and containerisation.  In more recent decades, Ireland's emphasis upon electronics and pharmaceuticals has been associated with the American market, but the first phase of factory building aimed to export to Britain and continental Europe. A Free Trade agreement signed with Britain in 1965 would be the precursor of the decision to enter the European Economic Community (EEC, later the European Union) in 1973.^[114] Yet these intentions to open new markets were hardly accompanied by major investment in the roads needed to reach the ports which were now Ireland's vital gateways.  Containerisation was a simple idea that seems so obvious that it is surprising it took so long to emerge. Instead of shipping goods in individual bales and packages, they are packed into large boxes. These can be loaded and unloaded at specially designed container berths (for instance by huge cranes manufactured in Killarney) and then piled high on the decks of ships designed as giant barges. But these dockside manoeuvres can be eliminated by transhipping the containers on heavy goods vehicles, which travel right through on roll-on, roll-off (Ro-Ro) ferries.^[115] Goods could now be delivered door-to-door faster and cheaper from Mallow to Munich or from Turin to Termonfeckin, but the burden of Ireland's creaking road network was massive.

Where do these long-term changes leave Ireland's south coast artery, the N25, in 2026? Overall, it has inherited a route that gradually crystallised in stagecoach days on a town-to-town basis.  Indeed, even the concept of a long-distance through-route emerged only hazily and belatedly.  It is easy now to forget that, until well into the twentieth century, coastal shipping handled considerable amounts of cargo. For a transitional period at least, stagecoaches could carry the few travellers who needed to journey between Waterford and Cork: as late as 1874, the streets of Dungarvan echoed the clip-clop of horses pulling coaches and jaunting cars.^[116] Yet Bianconi, who operated a service from Waterford to Dungarvan and on to Lismore, never saw a market for cars on the Dungarvan-Youghal-Cork route.^[117] For half a century after it opened in 1906, Rosslare concentrated on passengers and cattle, both of them best transported in that era by train. For thirty-five years from 1928, the era in which Ireland slowly embraced the motor vehicle, Youghal bridge was a weak link in both local and long-distance communications.  Given that Ireland was slow to develop a national highways strategy, and slower still to find the money to begin its implementation, it is hardly surprising that modernisation of the N25 has been, and remains, a slow and piecemeal process of catching up on past neglect. The road runs 188 kilometres from Dunkettle, on the outskirts of Cork, to Rosslare, of which only about fifty kilometres of the highway is dual carriageway, the East Cork Parkway out to Midleton, and sections around Waterford City and New Ross. At Castlemartyr, Henry Boyle's decision three centuries ago to rid his parkland of peasant traffic by rerouting the road to the north has given the village the specific hazard of a right-angled bend at one end of the main street. Early in the twenty-first century, local representatives began to press for a bypass.

Campaigning for Castlemartyr This account of pleas and demands for a bypass around Castlemartyr (and the accompanying case for Killeagh) can only be an outline. The published record shows something of the arguments persistently advanced by Fine Gael Deputy David Stanton, who retired in 2024, and by Sinn Féin Deputy Pat Buckley (first elected in 2016) and by Fianna Fáil Deputy James O'Connor, who placed his career on the line shortly after his election in 2020 by insisting on government recognition of the case for Castlemartyr. Deputies Noel McCarthy of Fine Gael and Liam Quaide of the Social Democrats, both first elected in 2024, have welcomed the 2026 signing of the contract to advance planning of a new Midleton-to-Youghal highway, which should logically first tackle the issue of the two bypasses. East Cork County Councillors have also been vocal in pressing for action. Yet public statements and Dáil interventions almost certainly constitute only a small fraction of the effort that has gone into research, persuasion and lobbying. The blatant failure of the system of government to provide the glaringly obvious solution to an intolerable problem is in no way the fault of elected representatives, from the whole range of the political spectrum, who argue a case to a machine which seems determined never to listen.

The earliest discussion of the need for a bypass around Castlemartyr that I can trace dates from August 2007, when rush-hour traffic was already described as "a nightmare".  Deputy David Stanton predicted that the problem of lengthy tailbacks would get worse, and insisted that a bypass was urgently needed.^[118] The issue came to the fore at that time because Cork County Council had approved new housing which doubled the population of Castlemartyr, despite concerns raised by the National Roads Authority (the forerunner of TII) about the implications of an influx of new residents for traffic volumes on the N25. Here, disparate strands of the planning process brought different priorities into conflict: with a surging population and a fall in the average size of households, Ireland needed more homes, and the local authority responded to this need. Castlemartyr seemed well placed for modest expansion. The completion of the Jack Lynch Tunnel in 1999 had dramatically improved access to the south side of Cork, while the prospective reopening of the railway to Midleton – which happened in 2009 – offered the prospect of commuter services to the city centre. The County Council pinned its hopes on "reports of a new road from Midleton which would skip Castlemartyr and Klleagh before hooking up with the Youghal bypass", which had been opened in 2003. The new housing was approved even though it would be "some years" before such a project became a reality.^[119]

That prospect quickly retreated even further into the future. In 2008, Ireland was hard hit by an international financial crisis.  Most major projects went on hold for a decade while taxpayers bailed out irresponsible bankers.  There was, however, one exception. Following the 2007 election, a Fianna Fáil-led coalition had secured the support of Jackie Healy-Rae, an Independent TD from Kerry. The terms of the deal were not made public, but were understood to include priority for a bypass around Castleisland, a small town (it has been called a street between two fields) notoriously plagued by traffic congestion. When Ireland was engulfed in the global crisis, capital expenditure projects – among them the Castleisland bypass – were abruptly cancelled, for the simple reason that there was no capital to spend.  However, following protests from Kerry, an unexpected sum of money was miraculously discovered in the departmental budget of the Minister for Transport. In 2009, the Castleisland bypass became the only major project to be launched in the State. Given the opaque nature of the whole episode, it is difficult to identify the relationship between cause and effect. Deputy Healy-Rae certainly claimed credit for jumping the queue.^[120] The upshot was that the two thousand people of Castleisland acquired their bypass in 2010; the two thousand people of Castlemartyr might just get lucky in or after 2030.

As better times eventually returned, Deputy Stanton – now a junior minister in the Department of Justice – restated the case in 2019. "A Castlemartyr relief road to alleviate traffic congestion is badly needed…. There is an urgent need to examine potential bypassing of the village by constructing a short relief road." He outlined what would become the standard case for action: 22,000 vehicles ploughing through the village every day, substantial delays in the morning and evening busy periods, heavy freight traffic from Rosslare causing large tailbacks, little prospect of a Cork-to-Waterford motorway solving the problem: " such a project is not planned at present and even if it were, it would take many years to develop". David Stanton knew what he was talking about: he lived nearby and was well aware of the pressure on local minor roads caused by traffic seeking to avoid Castlemartyr's saturated village street. "A relief road of just a few kilometres in length would go a long way to eliminate traffic congestion in Castlemartyr village." Within the government, he lobbied the Minister for Transport, pleading "that such a solution be examined as a matter of urgency".^[121]  

Deputy Stanton's lobbying succeeded in persuading Minister of Transport at the time, Deputy Shane Ross,^[122] to dip his toe in the water, and the modest results were reported to Sinn Féin Deputy Pat Buckley two years later, in October 2021. Deputy Buckley had asked the incoming Transport Minister, Eamon Ryan, for an update on the scheme. He received what would become that Deputy's standard response to enquiries relating to Castlemartyr, that he would refer the matter to Transport Infrastructure Ireland. TII duly reported that Cork County Council had recently completed an initial feasibility study on a bypass around the village which, not surprisingly, had identified "significant constraints that will need to be examined in the planning, design and appraisal of a relief road scheme". In 2019, there had been hopes that the Castlemartyr and Killeagh bottlenecks might be tackled under the heading of Minor Improvements, but the County Council had concluded that "a feasible outer bypass would have to be progressed as a Major Scheme given the scope and extent of such an outer bypass". While Killeagh had not been included in this scoping exercise, it was "likely that a relief road at this location would also have to be progressed as a Major Scheme". There were, of course, large Major Schemes and small Major Schemes, and bypassing Castlemartyr and Killeagh would hardly be in the same league as an intercity motorway. However, the reply went on to explain, since the recently published National Development Plan for 2021-2030 "does not specifically include for relief roads or bypasses of Killeagh and Castlemartyr", TII was "not in a position at present to indicate if funding can be made available in 2022" to progress the two schemes. Meanwhile, €100,000 had been allocated to Cork County Council "to facilitate further assessments at Castlemartyr" which would look for "any minor intervention schemes that would alleviate traffic on the N25, other than major bypasses".  This peanuts funding no doubt reflected reasonable doubt that any such miracle solutions existed. "I trust that this information is of assistance to you," the TII official politely concluded.^[123]

Meanwhile, the omission of Castlemartyr and Killeagh from the 2021 National Plan had triggered a minor political earthquake. The surprise capture of a Cork East seat by Fianna Fáil's James O'Connor at the general election the previous year had aroused the interest of political observers, the more so as he had displaced a sitting TD from his own party. Nine years earlier, in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a hammering at the polls had cost Fianna Fáil its decades-long dominance in Irish politics. Reeling from the loss of half its vote and three-quarters of its Dáil seats, the party of Eamon de Valera began slowly to rebuild itself from its 2011 third-place result. The emergence of an articulate young Deputy – James O'Connor was twenty-four – seemed a promising sign that Fianna Fáil might be able to engage with a new generation who were indifferent to the tribal loyalties of the past, and all the more so as he was not the product of one of the grandee dynasties descended from the founding Legion of the Rearguard.  It might be assumed that it was in the interests of his party leadership to demonstrate that he could deliver for his constituency. Deputy O'Connor had campaigned on east Cork issues and regarded himself as mandated to press for the much-needed bypasses around Castlemartyr and Killeagh. At Leinster House, he lobbied and pleaded for the projects, receiving – so he claimed – "repeated assurances" from on high that both schemes would be included in the National Plan, along with action on the Belvelly bottleneck on the road to Cobh. On the night before the document was due for publication, copies were circulated to TDs and, for the first time, James O'Connor discovered that the east Cork schemes were not mentioned. This looked very much like the aloof monster of 'Dublin' in action, fine words and patronising smiles, even a few surveyors' poles occasionally stuck in the ground, but when the people who mattered sat around a table to determine the priorities and divide the cake, distant communities struggling with impossible traffic burdens simply did not count. A problem, it seemed, was not something that was objectively measured in vehicle statistics, safety concerns or environmental damage. A problem existed only if 'Dublin' perceived it as such and, if the complaining community was not on the LUAS, by definition the problem did not exist. Perhaps this was unfair, but those who drew up the National Plan succeeded in making it the only plausible explanation of the failure to address any of the needs of east Cork.

Deputy O'Connor certainly did not take the rebuff quietly. When asked by journalists if he felt that he had been lied to, he replied "yes, by a multitude of colleagues". Nor did he lack the potential to fight back. If the system would not play by the rules, neither would James O'Connor, who threatened to quit Fianna Fáil and sit as an Independent. His defection would probably have inflicted some harm upon the party, but it is doubtful whether it would have strengthened his hand in advancing constituency issues. In Dáil politics, Independent TDs resemble people who play the lottery: every so often, one of them wins a big prize, but most are disappointed.^[124] General elections where voters are more than usually disillusioned with the mainstream political parties tend to produce bumper crops of Independents – nineteen in 2016 and 2020, fifteen in 2024 – but their very fecundity makes it unlikely that they can all be appeased with pork-barrel projects. Indeed, some Independent TDs only serve one or two terms before either giving up or being voted out. Communities that feel ignored may be tempted to elect an Independent to 'send a message' to Dublin, but there is not much point in the exercise if Dublin is resolved not to listen. In fact, despite a considerable sense that parts of the constituency are neglected, Cork East has remained faithful to established political parties, even though experienced and well-regarded non-party candidates have presented themselves for election.^[125] Thus Deputy O'Connor's threat to break ranks required political courage but might not have secured his declared ends had it actually been invoked.^[126]

Urgent negotiations followed, with the party leader, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, and the Public Expenditure Minister Michael McGrath, the government's ultimate safe pair of hands. Minister Ryan also took part. The angry Cork East Deputy was able to report that he received commitments that the government would give its "full support" to both bypass projects. James O'Connor did not attempt to oversell what he had achieved. "The good news is that this project will be initiated," he told his constituents, but "it will take a number of years".^[127] In the event, forward movement proved even more arthritic than predicted.

During the tense talks designed to prevent the Cork East TD from bolting the party, Micheál Martin was reported to have invoked a curious formula to insist that there was "flexibility" within the National Plan: "just because a road isn't specifically mentioned, doesn't mean that it will not be built". It is difficult to know what to make of this enigmatic remark.^[128] We may never discover whether and, indeed, how roads get built when they do not appear on government wish-lists, but we can be reasonably certain that the converse does not apply. Adding the east Cork projects to the list of alleged national priorities did not seem to advance them very far or fast. Indeed, they had been tacked on to a purely notional menu for the National Development Plan was never formally amended to include the two bypasses. Although he had been party to the treaty with Deputy O'Connor, Transport Minister Eamon Ryan was widely perceived to be unsympathetic towards new road projects, preferring to emphasise alternative public transport options. His critics argued that these ideas were the product of a Dublin mentality that did not understand the needs of rural Ireland.^[129]  In a response to a Dáil question in 2024, Minister Ryan seemed to imply that the absence of the two east Cork bypass projects from the formal National Plan made the crumbs that he scattered upon Castlemartyr and Killeagh commendable acts of generosity.

Cork East Deputies continued to press for action. If logical argument had been capable of moving forward the Castlemartyr bypass, the pungent comparisons with other projects offered by Deputy James O'Connor would have scooped the jackpot. During the 2021 rumpus, he pointed out that "we have a situation at the moment where we have 24,000 vehicles a day travelling up and down a small village on the main Cork to Rosslare and Waterford route, which is a vital link to Europe, and it’s actually more traffic than on the Waterford bypass which is a dual-carriageway route." "More cars go through the village of Castlemartyr than travel on the Limerick–Galway motorway," he observed three years later. "This is a staggering statistic for a small, beautiful rural village."^[130] Unfortunately, cogent argument and persistent Dáil questions by local TDs can came up against a ministerial brick wall. For instance, in January 2022, Labour Deputy Seán Sherlock asked Minister Ryan "if he has withdrawn funding for the N25 corridor Midleton to Youghal". With minor variations, the response would become a standard slab of obfuscation. "As Minister for Transport, I have responsibility for overall policy and exchequer funding in relation to the National Roads Programme. … I can confirm that an allocation has been made by TII to Cork County Council for the N25 Castlemartyr and Killeagh bypass, which is on the N25 Midleton to Youghal corridor. TII is best placed to provide information concerning the current status and funding of this proposed project."^[131] The refusal even to specify the amount of money made available – it was the pitifully small sum of €100,000 – is remarkable testimony to a low level of parliamentary accountability.  A year later, Deputy James O'Connor "asked the Minister for Transport the position regarding the N25 Midleton to Youghal project, including the Castlemartyr bypass; if he will provide a timeline for the project". Minister Ryan replied: "As Minister for Transport, I have responsibility for overall policy and exchequer funding in relation to the National Roads Programme. Under the Roads Acts 1993-2015 and in line with the National Development Plan (NDP), the planning, design and construction of individual national roads is a matter for Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), in conjunction with the local authorities concerned. … In this context, TII is best placed to advise you on regarding the N25 Midleton to Youghal project including the Castlemartyr bypass."^[132] There was no response to the request for a timeline. On this occasion, the supplementary reply, coming not from TII but passed to Cork Council Council, was added to the Dáil record. It stated that TII had allocated €100,000 to the County Council "to progress the N25 Midleton to Youghal Scheme during 2022. This scheme will include a bypass of Castlemartyr and Killeagh villages. Since May 2022, Cork County Council has procured a Technical Advisor to prepare a Strategic Assessment Report (SAR), as required by the Public Spending Code. It is anticipated that following receipt of the SAR, TII will seek Gate 0 (SAR) approval from Department of Transport in the first quarter of 2023. If approval from the Department of Transport is forthcoming and subject to the availability of funding in 2023, the project would then be progressed by Cork County Council, as road authority for the County, to Phase 1: 'Concept and Feasibility', of TII's Project Management Guidelines."^[133]

Put simply, when requested for an update on the Castlemartyr and Killagh bypasses, the Minister had said 'you had better ask TII, it’s their problem', TII had then remitted the question to the local authority, who explained that they had spent the small amount of available money on a preliminary study and that, if they were given a bit more cash, they would move on to the next stage of the planning process. The enigmatic reference to Gate Zero was not explained, but this circular process did not suggest that the projects were anywhere close to the starting blocks. As County Cork's Director of Roads Services explained to councillors: "The Council is currently unable to comment on a timeline as proceeding to the next phase is subject to the Department’s approval and securing funding from TII."^[134] In 2023, virtually identical answers were supplied to questions from Deputies Stanton and Sherlock. The pertinacity of Deputy O'Connor was rewarded with a slightly longer response in October, which informed him that a further €800,000 had been allocated to the County Council for the next stage in the planning, but appeared to imply that this was a generous gesture since the two bypasses were not listed in the 2021 National Development Plan.^[135]

By this time, Cork East's elected representatives were beginning to feel that they were being given the run-around. Deputy Sherlock's demand that the government should "stop letting the Green tail wag the Fianna Fáil dog" might perhaps be regarded as a predictable attempt by an opposition politician to sow dissent within a disparate coalition, while reassuring his own local power base that he was speaking up for "projects like the Mallow relief road".^[136] More explosive was the criticism from Deputy O'Connor, who had threatened to desert the Fianna Fáil benches two years earlier. He now declared himself to be "extremely frustrated" at what he regarded as a "disproportionate" level of power enjoyed by the Green Party within the coalition. Despite the promise of "full support" from the government in the delivery of his priority issue, the Castlemartyr bypass, he complained that there had been little progress. Diplomatically seeking to mobilise support from all corners of Cork East, describing the Castlemartyr scheme as "just one microcosm of other projects across Cork county": other infrastructure projects such as the Mallow relief road, the N25 dual carriageway between Carrigtwohill and Midleton, the Cobh access road, and the Midleton northern ring road, were all being "totally and utterly prevented from being advanced" by Transport Minister Eamon Ryan, who was regarded by the public as "the most powerful politician in the country".^[137] His outburst led to a further spat with the party leader, Micheál Martin, but made no discernible impact upon government policy. The €800,000 that had been lavished on day-dreaming about the two bypasses in 2023 began to look like a one-off bonanza. In 2024, €450,000 was allocated to thinking about them a bit more.^[138] This paltry sum was put in harsh perspective by news in 2024 that €336,000 had been spent at Leinster House on a bicycle shed for legislators that houses eighteen bikes.^[139]

In October 2024, Deputies O'Connor and Stanton joined forces to mount a cross-party attack on the failure to advance road projects across County Cork. The gladiatorial structure of the debate was slightly curious, since both Deputies were government supporters, and James O'Connor was now a Fianna Fáil party (i.e. non-ministerial) spokesperson on Transport issues. In that guise, he cited a range of stalled projects across the constituency, including the Castlemartyr and Killeagh bypasses, as schemes that needed substantial capital funding. It was left to David Stanton, who was close to retiring from the Dáil after 27 years, to concentrate on Castlemartyr, where he described the congestion at busy times as "mind-blowing". "Every morning, if you listen to the traffic reports on the radio, you hear about the traffic building up from the east into Castlemartyr. It is the same in the evening. There are several kilometres of traffic congestion on both sides morning and evening at peak times. It is very frustrating for people. Ironically, the pollution it causes is just crazy." Deputy Stanton's use of the adverb 'ironically' pointed to the absurdity of this threat to the health of Castlemartyr residents worsening under the detached supervision of a politician who cared about the environment. Unfortunately, the barb missed its target:  Minister Ryan did not put in an appearance. Fianna Fáil Deputy Anne Rabbitte was briefed to speak on his behalf, and responded with evident sympathy to the case made by the two Cork East representatives. However, since she was Minister of State at the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, it seemed unlikely that she could do much more than relay their messages to deaf ears.^[140]

The farce had its farewell performance on 22 January 2025. A new government was about to take office, minus the routed Green Party, but Minister Ryan retained his portfolio on a caretaker basis. Deputy Pat Buckley of Sinn Féin asked him "to provide a timeline for the completion of the Castlemartyr bypass; and if additional resources will be allocated to accelerate this critical project".  Eamon Ryan gave a last outing to his well-worn formula: "TII is best placed to advise you on the status of this project", adding: "The allocations for 2025 will be announced in the coming months."^[141] The following day, he was replaced as Minister for Transport by Darragh O'Brien of Fianna Fáil. Although crafted in the usual protective generalities, the new Programme for Government indicated a greater enthusiasm for expenditure on new roads. It also helpfully promised "multi-annual funding", the ear-marking of funds in subsequent years to advance specific projects and thus circumvent the stop-start process of box-ticking, hurdle-jumping and Gate Zeros.^[142] Under the new regime, the atmosphere notably lightened, as revealed in a Dáil discussion between Minister O'Brien and Deputy O'Connor early in March 2025.

Although Transport was not then part of his portfolio, Darragh O'Brien had visited Castlemartyr while touring east Cork in April 2023, where he was duly photographed with members of the Community Council against the background of the busy village street.^[143] "During the middle of the day, outside rush hour, you can see the level of traffic moving through", he told the Dáil. Here, then, was a TD from a Dublin constituency who had actually observed the problem. "We have tailbacks and congestion stretching several kilometres in either direction morning and evening and this is having a huge impact on the quality of life," Deputy O'Connor reminded him. The Minister gave an assurance that the project "remains an absolute priority of the Government". In the light of four years of foot-dragging, one might query both "absolute" and "remains", but the mood music was now encouraging.^[144] Major funding for east Cork road projects was announced in November 2025. In February 2026, came news that the County Council had appointed a design consultancy team for the N25 upgrade scheme between Midleton and Youghal, reportedly to concentrate on Castlemartyr, Killeagh and the increasingly controversial Lakeview roundabout bottleneck at Midleton. There was now a price tag for the two bypasses, although its range – €100 to €250 million – was elastic. Progress was still expected to be stately: the Options Selection phase would take around two years, "procurement for the upgrade [i.e. the cash]" would come (all being well) in 2029 and construction might start the following year. Deputy James O’Connor naturally welcomed the news, insisting that this new step made the project "real and tangible", and would give residents "their opportunity to be involved once it goes to public consultation during the Options Selection phase".^[145] In May 2026, the contract between the design consultants and Cork County Council was signed at a ceremony stage-managed by Deputy O'Connor on his home turf of Youghal. The government was represented by the lively junior Transport Minister, Deputy Jerry Buttimer. Among other local elected representatives in attendance was the County Mayor, Councillor Mary Linehan-Foley, a long-time campaigner for her home town. "While major infrastructure projects take time," Deputy O'Connor commented, "it is to be welcomed that the wheels are moving on this important project."^[146]

However, not everyone shared the euphoria of their local representatives. "Eight million and not an ounce of tarmac laid?" was one social media comment. Both the Dáil bike shed and the embarrassing cost overrun at the National Children's Hospital were quoted in support of public scepticism: "they'll be lucky to get a few cones for the road with that money". Others were unimpressed by the timeline. Fianna Fáil County Councillor Ann Marie Ahern welcomed the funding announcement but expressed disappointment "that commencement is still aimed for 2030.... It goes without saying that these projects are not recently highlighted areas of immediate attention but ones that have been listed for many many years". Her regret was echoed on social media. "So why 2030 - why does it take five years to plan?!" "I'll believe it when I see it," was another comment, which used a popular phrase (here omitted) to indicate disdain for the target date. The failure of the political process to tackle a glaring issue that had an obvious solution undermined the credibility of the elected representatives who had tried so consistently to tug at the levers of decision-making that refused to respond. "For Heaven's Sake they've been planning for the Castlemartyr and Killeagh bypass for over twenty years so now they kick it down the road another little bit. Thanks lads. What would we do without ye." A political system that fails to deliver has the perverse effect of undermining the elected representatives who play by its rules.

The outlook for Castlemartyr  As a historian, I have no special claim to make predictions about the future. While I feel some doubt about Deputy O'Connor's understandably exuberant response to the signing of the 2026 contact that the two bypass projects are now "go-go-go!",^[147] I hope the bulldozers will go into action around Castlemartyr in 2030, and wish that the process could be speeded up to lance the abomination at once. Nonetheless, I am troubled by several current trends that seem to spell trouble in the years ahead. The most intimidating of these, which I discuss later, relate to the fiscal challenges facing the State in the years ahead.  The political system has shamefully failed to tackle the N25 bottlenecks in east Cork in good times. It may be unable to do better if there is an economic downturn in the years ahead. (A censorious cynic might even conclude that pressure upon resources will provide new and welcome excuses to dismiss and ignore the problem altogether.) But there are also internal dynamics in the political geography of the Cork East Dáil constituency which risk creating tensions among rival priorities. The system of government is quick to identify weakness and adept at the exploitation of division. Castlemartyr and Killeagh could be at risk of suffering as much from the misjudgement of their local friends as from the malice of their institutional foes.

The political scientist Tom Garvin wrote in 1972 (writing in an era of male-dominated politics) that the characteristic Deputy was "a local man, well entrenched in the local social system … and concerned more with being an ambassador for his community to the central government than with the task of making national policy or law". Professor Basil Chubb, the grandparent of the discipline of Political Science in Ireland, elaborated the point: TDs were "identified with the particular parts of the constituency in which they live… there is a marked tendency for Deputies to have 'bailiwicks'" – a pattern which is particularly reflected in the complex structure of Cork East. (One by-product of this tendency was that a republic firmly based on the principle of equality generated a remarkable number of political dynasties, where a local power base was passed on to a family member through hereditary succession.) The overall result was that most TDs were (and are) less concerned with the shaping of government policy than with its administration. Deputies were content to leave the big decisions that determined the size of the cake to their party leaders, contenting themselves with who got what when the slices and the crumbs filtered down to their districts.^[148] In this, Ireland did not greatly differ from other parliamentary systems, in which backbenchers rarely get anywhere near the levers of power. However, the scope for the ordinary elected representative belonging to a major party to secure favours within a clientelist system has been steadily undermined by the decline in support for the two principal players, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.^[149] In November 1982, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael shared 86 percent of the popular vote; by 2020, this had reduced by precisely half, to 43 percent.  When twenty-first century Ireland goes to the polls, neither the voters nor the politicians themselves have any notion of the composition of the governing team that will emerge, and still less of the projects that they might agree to pursue, because the policies of successive incoming coalitions have to be thrashed out in detailed Programmes for Government. Hence in 2020, Deputy James O'Connor was elected with what he believed was a mandate to press for action on bypasses for Castlemartyr and Killeagh and, as a government supporter, he had reason to hope that his pleas would be heeded. However, the post-election arithmetic resulted in the Green Party entering the cabinet, and the new Deputy for Cork East found himself arguing his case to a Minister of Transport who showed little enthusiasm for the construction of much-needed roads.

The internal dynamics of Cork East The first point to note here is that there is a big difference between Cork East and east Cork. Regions and districts tend to be amorphous and undefined, but most people would regard east Cork as the stretch of country that includes Cobh, Midleton and Youghal, plus their local hinterlands. The Cork East constituency is considerably larger, taking in Fermoy and extending to Mitchelstown in the north-east corner of the county. Until the town was removed from the constituency by redistribution in 2024, Cork East also included Mallow, which most people would unquestionably regard as north Cork. The legendary Workers' Party (and, later, Labour) TD, Joe Sherlock, built his power base here by successfully campaigning for the construction of local authority housing, affectionately and gratefully known as the Sherlock Homes.^[150]

 Following the 2024 boundary change, the population of the constituency was 110,000 (I round the figures) and the electorate of 83,000 returned four TDs.^[151] Viewed in rural terms, Cork East is relatively homogenous, its farming community predominantly involved in cattle, with much specialisation in dairying. The farmers are conventionally regarded as the bedrock of the Fine Gael vote, although candidates from both major parties have had backgrounds on the land. In the twenty-twenties, it may be said that Cork East provides quotas to elect one Deputy apiece from Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin, with the two traditional parties and candidates from the Left all in contention for the final seat. In a multi-member system, there can of course be competition within a party to secure its seat: in 2020, James O'Connor from Youghal unexpectedly ousted the sitting Fianna Fáil representative, Kevin O'Keeffe from Mitchelstown. Overall, in Cork East, the three main parties have a particular need to contain internal rivalries, since they are roughly balanced, so that serious divisions in any of them could risk the leaking of transfers sufficient to defeat all their candidates.^[152]

By contrast with the countryside, the urban landscape of Cork East is a patchwork of unrelated concerns and competing interests. Here I draw upon 2022 census data from the user-friendly interactive website of the Central Statistics Office (CSO), once again rounding the figures.^[153] Way out ahead of the pack come Cobh and Midleton, each with 14,000 people, to which may be added five and a half thousand residents of Carrigtohill.^[154] Four years later, the census information is already out of date. While the population of Cobh grows sedately by a few hundred people a year, Midleton and Carrigtohill are booming: by 2034, Midleton is projected to double in size, to over 27,000, while Carrigtohill will reach 9,500.^[155] The CSO's detailed presentation of the numbers does not tell the whole story, since it uses satellite data to delineate the precise boundaries of the built-up areas that constitute each urban community. Of course, ribbon development along every nearby country road means that the effective populations of Midleton and Cobh are much larger. Then, too, the CSO regards Glounthaune as part of the Cork conurbation, although its residents vote in Cork East – adding another couple of thousand to the south-western demographic imbalance. Put simply, the Midleton-Carrigtohill-Cobh sprawl already accounts for one-third of the voting power within Cork East, and it is likely to become even more dominant. (Of course, redistribution may change these internal dynamics, and the constituency could also become a five-seater.)

The other main urban conglomerations in Cork East are Youghal, with 8,500 people, Fermoy, home to 6,700 and Mitchelstown, which is below 4,000. On the census map, Youghal sits in solitary splendour in Cork's far east, but Fermoy has three smaller communities in its vicinity,^[156] enough to ensure that the two towns punch about the same demographic and electoral weight.  What we might call Metro-Castlemartyr come further down the list: including Ladysbridge and Mogeely, it totals around 4,000 people; Killeagh adds about 900 more. Between Cork and Fermoy, there is a similar-sized loose cluster at Watergrasshill and Rathcormac, detached suburbs that have far superior road access to the city thanks to the M8 motorway. Each of these communities has its own interests, all of them undoubtedly legitimate and certainly energetically voiced. Hence the internal demography is bound to affect the wish-list priorities of Cork East.^[157] Castlemartyr and Killeagh are home to less than four percent of the constituency's population. How far can the two villages count upon wider support? Who cares about the N25? The attitude of Youghal may be crucial here.

Transport is not the only issue that concerns voters. Rapid growth in the Midleton-Carrigtohill-Cobh triangle has produced a predictable range of challenges relating to infrastructure. "New houses are being built at pace and more families are moving in, but the facilities which are core to community life are lagging badly behind," Deputy Liam Quaide told the Dáil in May 2026.^[158] The burgeoning south-western corner of the constituency needs the usual range of services such as schools and healthcare. Added to this is the major and tragic problem of flooding. A prolonged heavy rainstorm caused widespread disruption across east Cork in October 2023, with exceptional devastation in Midleton, where the Main Street was inundated, affecting 300 businesses and 600 homes. Residents were particularly frustrated since they felt that nothing had been done to prevent a repeat of a previous flood eight years earlier.^[159] Three years on, they are not reassured by government response to the challenge: temporary measures seem slow to materialise, a permanent flood protection scheme advances at the usual arthritic pace (2031 is the latest target date for its completion). Midleton businesses complain of inadequate compensation and struggle to secure insurance cover without which they cannot function. Naturally, elected representatives have argued the case publicly and have no doubt lobbied privately.^[160] In politics, there are only so many chips that an elected representative can cash in. Transport is not the only area where Cork East TDs are expected to deliver for their voters.

Transport priorities In terms of its communications needs, the south-western corner of the constituency looks firmly west towards Cork city. There can be little doubt that Midleton sympathises with Castlemartyr and Killeagh but, if its elected representatives were forced to choose, they would be under pressure to prioritise the town's links with the regional capital over a solution to the bottlenecks in the its hinterland to the east. Between Carrigtohill and Dunkettle, where it is grandly called the East Cork Parkway, the N25 was improved to motorway standard between 1994 and 1997. The recent upgrade of the Dunkettle interchange has further improved commuter and business access to the city, although congested downtown Cork has not shaken off the old jest that it is a red-light district. Unfortunately, slightly further afield, Cobh has one major highway issue, while Midleton has three. 

[a] Cobh Cobh's principal communications problem is the narrow humped-back bridge at Belvelly, which links Great Island to the mainland. Built around 1803, the bridge is yet another example of a fine piece of highway engineering that was a bold piece of work for its time but is now required to do a job for which it was never designed. As the R624 which crosses it is a regional and not a national route, it has fallen down the priority queue. In 2023, Deputy Buckley received an opaquely discouraging reply to a request to the then-Minister of Transport that the road should be reclassified as an N-route.^[161] A long-time Cobh resident commented in 2024 that "this was being talked about when I was a young lad", but that the Belvelly problem remained "a little bridge that no government seems to want to deal with".^[162]

The other obstacle on the R624 is the bridge at Carrigaloe, where the road dog-legs under the railway, as it has done since 1860. The angle of approach to the obstacle was adjusted in 1938,^[163] but I cannot trace any remedial work since, and it is hard to see what could be done anyway. To avoid Carrigaloe, many Cobh drivers use a back road across Great Island that joins the R624 at Belvelly, thereby adding to congestion at the bridge. Cork County Council's planned Great Island Connectivity Scheme generated a Strategic Assessment Report in 2022, which the County Council hoped would lead to a Preliminary Business Case in 2023.^[164] In March 2024, a Project Outline Document (known as a 'POD': planning generates its own arcane vocabulary) was submitted to the Department of Transport. However, almost eighteen months later, Deputy Liam Quaide called for "a serious injection of ambition and urgency from Government". By then, there were in fact more promising indications of action at national level, and Cork County Council was reported to be putting together a business case. The project had a provisional price-tag of €250 million – much the same as the Castlemartyr and Killeagh bypasses.^[165]

[b: i] Midleton: the dual carriageway  Midleton's three priority highway improvement projects are equally imperative. In 1968, the stretch of the N25 between Midleton and Carrigtohill became one of the first dual carriageways in the State. In those less pressured days, it seemed right to allow access from side roads and even from front gardens. Half a century later, the road would benefit from a makeover to bring it up to the standard of the East Cork Parkway of which it is a continuation. Preparations for an upgrade were described in 2026 as "paused at the route options selection phase since 2021 due to funding constraints". In 2025, Cork County Council was allocated a derisory €45,000 for minor safety works, which, said the Council's director of highways, "wouldn’t even cut the hedges for you". In 2026, the same official reported, with some frustration: "At present, we are six to seven years off construction, and it will then take a further two years to build. That’s assuming that all goes according to plan, and we get the required government funding, and we have a positive outcome for the project from An Coimisiún Pleanála." In 2026, a further €500,000 was allocated for unspecified preparatory work, but the minister responsible was unable to say whether this would result in the closure of dangerous junctions at Ballyrichard and Water Rock, where more Midleton housing was planned.^[166]

[b: ii]: Midleton's Lakeview roundabout The second item on the Midleton agenda, the Lakeview roundabout, is an example – as at Castlemartyr – of the way that pressures can grow in a manner that is barely perceptible from week to week, until the location reaches the point where infrastructure can no longer handle the strain. A social media post in 2025 described the peak-hour traffic congestion at Lakeview as "insane". The roundabout is the point where the road south from the town crosses the N25 bypass to become the R630. This not only gives access to Midleton (and especially to three large nearby schools) from the town's suburb of Ballinacurra, but it also serves scattered communities further afield such as Cloyne and Ballycotton. Of course, it could be that these are no more than faraway places whose quaint-sounding names bring smiles to the dinner parties of Dublin 4, but it is a more serious matter that the R630 is the link between the national highway system and the Whitegate Oil Refinery. The 2026 fuel protests brought home Ireland's dependence upon its sole oil refinery, which supplies around 200 tanker trucks a day – meaning 400 vehicle movements in the two directions, almost all of them passing through Lakeview.^[167] An additional joining lane was added to the roundabout in 2019 to enable traffic from the R630 to feed into the westbound lanes of the bypass, but tailbacks remain a problem, especially at rush hours.^[168]

[b: iii]: the "Midleton Northern Connectivity Corridor" Re-engineering the Lakeview roundabout will be a massive challenge, especially as it is located within a built-up area. It may be further complicated by its relationship to another local project, pompously designated as the Midleton Northern Connectivity Corridor.^[169] In more conventional terms, there is a need for a relief road around the east side of the town from the northern access route of the Mill Road to the N25, which would improve access to the station.  This is intended to supplement (and complete) a similar relief road skirting the north-west of the town, which was completed in 2009. This eastern mini-bypass is intended to divert traffic from the gridlocked main street "particularly heavy goods vehicles". Cork County Council expected to complete the preliminary design in 2023.^[170] Despite hopes that the project would move to its next stage in the second half of that year, it was reported in December 2023 that construction was "unlikely to get underway until at least 2027".^[171] It appears to have been impossible to maintain even that degree of breakneck urgency. Two years later, in February 2026, €250,000 was allocated to move the scheme "through the next Gateway" (whatever that means).  

Three points in relation to the Midleton north-eastern relief road illustrate the way in which planning of transport projects is carried on in sealed tunnels that rarely seem to interact. First, in 2026, Irish Rail is close to completing the double-tracking of ten kilometres of the line from Midleton to Glounthaune. It is intended to increase the present service, two trains an hour in each direction, to a ten-minute schedule, virtually a shuttle service.^[172] At present, the Mill Road level-crossing (which intermittently blocks the principal route into town from the north) closes four times an hour. In May 2026, an Irish Rail consultation document envisages that the gates will be "closed to road traffic for 30 minutes in the peak hours".^[173] There are traffic lights one hundred metres north of the level-crossing at the junction with the existing western relief road and the access road to the growing suburb of Broomfield. This is already at risk of gridlock from the tailback of traffic held up by the train crossing at busy times. One might expect that, in a joined-up transport policy, these exciting developments on the rail front would be would accompanied by urgent action to complete (let's take a deep breath and say it) the Midleton Northern Connectivity Corridor, not only to improve access to the station (which would seem to be an obvious move) but, above all, to meet the 2023 objective of diverting heavy goods vehicles around the town. I detect little sign of any such activity. Perhaps the planning process might take more interest if the Mill Road level-crossing could be renamed 'Gate Zero'.

A second element that makes the lack of movement on the northern relief road relates to Midleton's world-famous distillery, which is located on the north-eastern edge of the town. In 2022, Irish Distillers announced a €250 million investment in a new plant on a 22.25 hectare site north of the N25. When planning permission was granted in 2024, it was envisaged that the main access to the new facility would eventually be from the relief road. Indeed, the applicants were charged a fee of €2 million as a fifty-percent contribution to the cost of its construction.^[174] Work on the distillery extension, which generated 800 construction jobs, began soon after, and naturally generated additional traffic. It seems strange that the €252 million investment of private capital cannot trigger the estimated €2 million of public expenditure for a short relief road that everyone agrees is badly needed.

The two aspects of the Midleton northern relief road already discussed relate to its role in improving access to the railway and the support it could provide for the town's leading employer. But there is also a third dimension, its implications for traffic flows on the N25, which will complicate the emerging problem of the Lakeview bottleneck. As envisaged in outline, the southern end of relief road will terminate at the existing junction on the N25 which provides access to the town centre, 1.4 kilometres east of Lakeview. Vehicles exiting from the Youghal road (its local name) do not always realise the oncoming traffic is accelerating, and the junction is notorious for discourteous and downright dangerous drivers. The proposed solution has been "a new roundabout. This roundabout will enhance road safety."^[175] Unfortunately, it will probably also cause another bottleneck. Thus while one strand of highway planning is beginning to look at the possibility – even the necessity – of a Lakeview flyover, another is committed to the installation of a similar obstacle in its eastern approach. But a second, if perhaps smaller-scale, flyover to filter distillery trucks and station traffic in and out of the northern connectivity road will add considerably to the cost of the overall project.

The darkly feared danger here must be that 'Dublin' will see its malevolent opportunity and announce that east Cork cannot possibly be granted two flyovers and two bypasses, and that choices must be made – a classic strategy of divide and fool. Deputy James O'Connor has included Lakeview in his campaign for Castlemartyr and Killeagh,^[176] but it may be that, at some point, elected representatives will be forced to indicate their priorities within the overall agenda for upgrades. As already suggested, it is likely that Midleton voters will feel a polite interest in tackling the bottlenecks at the two villages to their east, but far more urgent imperatives to eliminate the Lakeview obstacle and improve the ageing dual carriageway. National transport policy resolutely refuses to see the N25 as the key highway between Cork and Rosslare, choosing instead to attempt to bury it within the fantastical nonsense of the Atlantic Road Corridor. Irrespective of the preferences of individual ministers, who come and go, the abstract entity of government is likely to be conscious of this corner of County Cork mainly as the link between the Whitegate oil refinery and the Little Island storage facilities. Lakeview and the dual carriageway will thus appear as priorities of national importance, while Castlemartyr and Killeagh will once again be dismissed as insignificant villages. There are already signs of tensions within east Cork. A 2026 social media post from Youghal alleged that "Midleton (which is the Dublin of East Cork) gets all the priority and the further east you go the less priority is applied". A voice from Midleton commented that congestion at Lakeview would be even worse but for the "buffering" of traffic at Castlemartyr: a bypass there would mean that more vehicles would reach the town's pinchpoint, and faster.

And so we return to the core question: in the last resort, who in Cork East really cares about Castlemartyr and Killeagh? Voters across the northern swathe of the constituency can hardly be expected to regard the N25 as a priority. They have their own predictable and legitimate concerns about a range of services, while local representatives in Fermoy complain specifically about the traffic problem caused by the N72 that runs through their town. This is the main road to Killarney and west Kerry which carries a considerable volume of tourist traffic in summer. Several of its sections are patently inadequate. Put bluntly, the elimination of the Castlemartyr and Killeagh obstacles on the south coast highway is more important to Cork City, Waterford and Wexford than to Ballyhooly or Mitchelstown. Yet localism is so deeply embedded in Irish representative politics that no TDs from those areas would risk joining an inter-county coalition to endorse the need for projects in east Cork for fear of criticism on the ground alleging disloyalty to their own voters. Not only is there a failure in the system of government to conceptualise projects in joined-up thinking, but the hermetically-sealed unit of the localised electoral power base makes it difficult for TDs themselves to demand a broader approach.

[c] Youghal Youghal is the one large community in Cork East with an interest in the overall efficiency of the N25 across the whole county, and the only large voter base that has endorsed the need for the two bypasses. One of the earliest and most successful towns in attracting factories, Youghal was  subsequently hard hit both by deindustrialisation and by the loss of its traditional holiday trade: "not a job to be had," the Irish Independent lamented in 2009, as it chronicled "how a seaside town has gone from boom to bust".^[177] The community has been impacted not merely in economic terms but in its collective psychology as well. Deputy O'Connor, a local resident himself, put the point as tactfully as he could in a 2024 Dáil contribution: "Youghal needs a serious lift. People there have lost all faith in the Government."^[178] It is, as I can testify, an interesting and a friendly place, and Youghal people certainly do not lack big ideas. Indeed, the idea of bypassing Castlemartyr and Killeagh may have come to be seen as something of a miracle solution that would allow the town to escape from its decades-long malaise. The strength of this support helped secure the unexpected election of Deputy O'Connor in 2020 when he campaigned energetically on N25 issues. However, since then, alternative projects have become popular in Youghal, and it is important that they are not exploited as divisive elements capable of undermining the case for the two bypasses. 

[c, i]: Reopening the Midleton-Youghal railway  In 2009, passenger railway services were reopened between Midleton and Cork's Kent station. It is tempting to agree with Cork East Social Democrat TD Liam Quaide who described the failure to include Youghal in the 2009 reopening as "a colossal error".^[179] In this case, hindsight is perhaps unfairly censorious. Bringing the train back to Midleton involved relaying ten kilometres of single track to Glounthane and recommissioning two stations, at a cost of €75 million. A further 23 kilometres of steel and three stations would have been needed to reach Youghal. Initially, nobody could know how popular the initiative would be, and Midleton had only an hourly service to and from Cork. In fact, the project quickly proved a considerable success, and the trains were soon used by residents of a wide area of east Cork who, in the absence of the Midleton Northern Connectivity Corridor, boldly navigate unsuitable backroads and treat the town's station as a park-and-ride. Not surprisingly, a subterranean sentiment flourished in favour of extending the line to Youghal, with many people insisting that since route selection and roadbed preparation had been settled in Victorian times, the process of track-laying would be both quicker and cheaper than in standard projects.

In 2017, the former railway line between Waterford City and Dungarvan was reopened as a greenway, reportedly attracting a quarter of a million visitors in its first year. A campaign quickly developed in Youghal to convert the derelict railway track to Midleton into a similar facility for strollers and cyclists. At this point, it should be stressed, there was no conflict between the town's enthusiasm for its own leisure facility and its general support for N25 upgrades at Castlemartyr and Killeagh that would improve its access by road to Cork. In 2018, Irish Rail made it bluntly clear that it was "not realistic" to reopen the railway, arguing that its infrastructure was so outdated as to be unusable, so that track laying would have to start from scratch. Indeed, Irish Rail grumpily complained that it did not have enough cash to maintain its existing network and sought to offload its residual obligation for maintenance costs on the ghost line to Youghal. Consequently, it enthusiastically welcomed the greenway scheme and was only too keen to hand over responsibility to Cork County Council. The only figleaf of hope offered to local rail campaigners was the retention of the right to resume control if a railway became a feasible option sometime in the future – but that seems to have been a standard lawyers' safeguard that was unlikely ever to become operative.^[180]

The east Cork greenway went ahead and opened in 2024, at a cost of €22 million. Two years later, it would be fair to say that Youghal has two opposed camps in regard to the project. It may be that its proponents oversold the scheme, causing renewed disillusionment in the town when it became apparent that the greenway was not the long-sought magic lever that would reanimate lost local prosperity.^[181] This disappointment, in turn, reignited demands for the extension of the railway from Midleton.  "A lot of people feel this was a missed opportunity with respect to the return of rail," Deputy O'Connor diplomatically told the Dáil in February 2026.^[182] Deputy Quaide has been more forthright: it was "gravely short-sighted to tarmac over this rail corridor for a recreational amenity when East Cork’s transport system was increasingly seized up with traffic". Thus criticism of the greenway forms one strand in an increasingly strident campaign to reopen the railway to Youghal. Others believe it would be possible to combine the two schemes: Deputy Quaide has suggested that "the corridor is wide enough to accommodate a single-track rail alongside the greenway".^[183] But this would imply a shuttle service to Midleton, where passengers would have to change trains (and platforms) – a hiccup that would considerably reduce the amenity value to the people of Youghal.  

There is a strong argument for reopening the east Cork railway, but it is one that operates on a wider plane of benefit to the environment and more general but currently unquantifiable stimulus to the local economy of the entire Blackwater valley. The operative parallel here is the success of the Midleton line, which is now functioning with a dynamism that even optimists might not have foreseen (and that without the obvious support of station access through a short relief road). The case for returning the trains to Youghal essentially makes sense as part of an overall strategy to rebalance the emphasis on passenger transport back to rail, what Deputy Quaide has called a "decisive shift towards rail and light rail" at national level.

However, enthusiastic public support – as certainly exists in Youghal right now – can carry with it two dangers that will undermine the town's own interests. The first is a risk of adopting declaratory positions that may be exploited to undermine the campaign for the Castlemartyr and Killeagh bypasses. For instance, there is much to be said for Deputy Quaide's assertion that the M50 Dublin ring road proves "that increasing road capacity beyond a certain point simply entrenches congestion. It is an infrastructural fallacy to believe we can build our way out of transport failure with ever more road projects." Yet it would be counterproductive to posit a stark alternative between rail and targeted roads intended to do specific tasks: no sane person seeks to criss-cross east Cork with tarmac for the sake of it.  It is only necessary to picture the gridlock in Cork city centre if the N40 southern ring road had not been constructed, or the chaos in the main streets of Midleton and Youghal if they had not been bypassed. (They are, of course, crowded enough as it is.) Castlemartyr and Killeagh simply ask for smaller-scale versions of the comfort surgery already performed at major centres.^[184] It is important that Youghal's campaign for the railway should be presented as the counterpart and not as the alternative to the demand for the N25 upgrades that the town needs to improve its access to Cork. It would be sad indeed if Youghal were to undermine the case for the two bypasses crucial to the town's access to Cork by committing itself to the demand for a railway that was unlikely to be delivered any time soon.

The second danger in a wildfire public campaign is that it may tend to underestimate what Deputy O'Connor has called the "hurdles and barriers" involved in any major project when he argued for the reopening of the railway in the Dáil in February 2026. Indeed, he seemed to be pleading with the government to "give us a realistic feel for how feasible this is" in order to counteract simplistic arguments "exceptionally disingenuously pumped out by people involved, who want to make this feel as though it can be done with the click of a finger and overnight, when that is just not how things happen".^[185] A realistic campaign is more likely to be a persuasive campaign, and there are three major problems that supporters of a Youghal-to-Midleton railway should confront.

The first is cost, especially in relation to relative benefit in the political language of priorities. A decade on from its gloomy rejection of any thought of reinstating the line, Irish Rail is making more accommodating noises. In January 2026, a company official estimated that "on today's prices" it would cost "probably plus €200 million to deliver a reinstated full railway to Youghal".^[186] Speaking in the Dáil in February 2026, Deputy O'Connor pointed out that, with dual tracking almost completed out to Midleton, an extension to Youghal would also require two tracks, bringing the cost to "somewhere north of €350 million for the full retrofit of the existing line". (Dual tracking would also kiss goodbye to the €22 million spent on the greenway.) In May 2026, the reopening of passenger services between Dublin and Navan was announced. Navan is home to 35,000 people, four times the size of Youghal. There is a certain official insouciance about the likely cost of project, but it is estimated (the correct term might be 'guesstimated') that the project will devour one billion Euro, and that it will be ten years before the first train runs.^[187]

Second, there is a risk of exaggerating the impact that a railway to Youghal might make on traffic volumes. It seems over-optimistic to claim that the line would "drastically cut the number of cars on the N25 corridor" and thus reduce the 20,000 vehicles clogging up Castlemartyr each day.^[188] A resolution of support for the project passed by Cork City Council in March 2026 was a welcome indication of breadth of regional support, but the claim by the proposer of the motion that I"[i]t would remove an awful lot of cars from the N25, up to 8 or 10,000 cars per day I would imagine" risks overselling the case.^[189] On the day earlier cited, Thursday 21 May 2026, 14,428 cars passed over the traffic sensors at Loughaderra. It is straining credulity to suggest that between 55 and 70 percent of these vehicles originate in Youghal.

At the 2022 census, 1,996 residents of Youghal reported that they drove to work, school, college or childcare; a further 1,318 were car passengers. In addition, 226 people travelled to work by van.^[190] In round figures, we can identify two thousand cars and over two hundred vans being used by Youghal commuters – giving the attractive target of nearly four and a half thousand to-and-from vehicle journeys every day. Of course, many of these were people working very locally. When residents of the town (not just car drivers) were asked how long they took to reach "work, school or college", 950 people reported that they were on the road for more than three-quarters of an hour each morning.^[191] A few of these marathons perhaps involved a drive to Waterford (even at peak hours, Dungarvan is within 45 minutes), but the time involved suggests that most were working in the Cork area, probably including Cobh, Midleton and even Ringaskiddy. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to assume that almost all of these commuters were all travelling by car, but we should not forget that forty percent of commuters were passengers, husbands and wives sharing, or neighbours arranging informal car pools. (Just 393 Youghal people used buses or minibuses. Anyone relying on Bus Éireann to get to work in Cork would not hold down their job for long, and these numbers obviously include youngsters on school buses.^[192]) Overall it is unlikely that more than 900 cars – and probably far fewer – headed for Midleton or Cork from Youghal during each morning rush hour, causing at most 1,800 daily transits in the narrow village street of Castlemartyr.^[193] In addition, Youghal people owned a further 1,800 cars that were not used for commuting, but it is hard to see why more than, at most, a couple of hundred of their owners would have felt the need to drive west on any day. Thus the census shows that, at most, Youghal motorists may have been responsible for about one-seventh of the cars passing through Castlemartyr. It may be objected that the true figures should include a much wider area: 34 residents of Killeagh took more than three-quarters of an hour to get to work by car, and here we should perhaps add the 42 Killeagh commuters who are on the road for thirty to forty-five minutes, perhaps working in Midleton or Carrigtohill and also contributing to the congestion at Castlemartyr. However the figures are presented, they fall well short of the "awful lot" of eight to ten thousand vehicles that would be removed from the N25 by the return of the railway.

Nor is there any guarantee that Youghal's car commuters would all transfer to the train. The town's attractive historic station building is not very conveniently located either for the old centre on the Blackwater estuary to the north, or in relation to the modern Californian-style suburbs that climb the slopes to the west. (In 2022, over 500 of Youghal's car commuters lived north of Cork Hill, where access to the bypass would be as easy as threading through the narrow streets of the town.) The former station yard might be converted into a large car park for several hundred vehicles, and there is additional seafront parking nearby, but access would be a problem, both from the town centre or from the Upper Strand, the former main road from the west. A park-and-ride station at Gortroe, with generous parking space and easy access to the N25 near the Youghal bypass, might attract car-and-train commuters from a much wider area. However, it is worth noting that the Midleton station car parks, 283 spaces which also serve the greenway, are rarely full. Other stations on the line are also inconveniently sited. There are three large schools on the south side of Midleton, but the nearest of them is a kilometre from the station. Since access to all three is via the notoriously congested main street, a shuttle bus would hardly be an option. The station at Carrigtohill is half a kilometre from the village and not close to the industrial estates. Few vehicles are left all day in the car park there.

Above all, Cork is a very large urban area, most of it distant from Kent station. The city's factories, its hospitals and its two universities are all several kilometres from the terminus, and bus connections are notoriously sluggish at peak hours. The planned Cork Luas, a 16.8 kilometre light railway from Mahon Point to Ballincollig, is intended to connect with college and health facilities, but it is unlikely to operate before the mid-2030s. Ringaskiddy, a major centre for employment, is twenty kilometres away. "It is nonsense to suggest that the restoration of the Midleton to Youghal railway would have any significant impact on the traffic volumes on the N25," commented one contributor to social media. "Anyone who travels the N25 towards the city at peak travel times each morning will see the huge volumes of vehicles heading to the tunnel. A Youghal to Cork train would be of no use to those road users."^[194]

The third point to bear in mind about the extension of the train to Youghal is that passenger rail services offer no solution to one of the core problems at Castlemartyr, around one thousand heavy goods vehicles that plough through the village every day. There are no freight or even parcel services on the Cork suburban railway network. Indeed, in the first years of the twenty-first century, Irish Rail's bulk goods service was in full retreat under the impact of containerisation. Lines from Ballina in Mayo to the ports of Dublin and Waterford have been adapted to carry 9 feet six inches (2.9 metres) high cube containers, while weight restrictions on the Dublin-to-Cork main line limit freight trains to 42 TEUs – the equivalent of 42 articulated juggernauts. Rail seems to be useful primarily in transporting bulk commodities such as timber and mineral ores. Irish Rail estimates that the two Ballina routes have made it possible "to save nearly 9,000 road journeys per year": the target for 2040 is to eliminate "140,000 HGV journeys on our roads annually". This is to be welcomed, but it does not have much to say to a single small community coping with almost 300,000 truck movements a year. The basic limitation remains: trains can only move goods to places where the rails will take them. Greater emphasis upon rail freight may eventually reduce the number of long-haul juggernauts, but it will still involve a great deal of short-run delivery by vans and lorries. Irish Rail realistically operates in both mediums. "Whether by rail or road, Iarnród Éireann Freight will get you there."^[195]

The reopening of the railway to Youghal represents an obvious component of a broader shift towards emphasising alternative and environmentally friendly forms of transport. Its amenity value to the local population would go beyond the luxury of mere convenience, and it would help to bring much-needed new life into the town, even though day-trippers from Cork might not inject much cash. As happened with the Midleton line, which opened in 2009 with a relatively low-key hourly service, the availability of the train would steadily increase the demand for its use. But it is doubtful whether a passenger train service alone would generate the 'big bang' sought by some of its more enthusiastic promoters. Hence it is important that the demand to reopen the east Cork railway should form part of a wider campaign of transport reform and, in particular, that it should not divert support from the two bypasses. Trains to Youghal would divert some passengers from cars to carriages, but they would make no difference whatsoever to the burden of heavy goods vehicles grinding through Castlemartyr and Killeagh. Youghal needs jobs. Since politicians seem to have abandoned earlier fantasies about relocating civil servants from Dublin,^[196] employment in the town is most likely to be created by encouraging private investment. But businesses will not set up in the Youghal simply because the managing director's spouse can ride the train to the city and take lunch at a bijou bistro off Oliver Plunkett Street. Suppliers of goods and services will need assurance that they will have rapid and unimpeded access for delivery to the large and attractive customer base of the Cork urban area. The two bypasses are vital to Youghal's westward connectivity. In 2026, their construction is still not guaranteed, and they should remain the town's first priority.

[c: ii] Buses  About 180 buses pass through Castlemartyr each weekday, of which 42 are scheduled services that stop in the village street. Forming less than one percent of the total traffic burden, they do not contribute greatly to congestion.^[197] Equally, public transport currently does not offer much benefit to Youghal, nor indeed to the intervening communities on the way to Cork. The first westbound Bus Éireann 40 express service is timetabled to leave from Youghal at 9.25. Having crawled out of Waterford at 8 a.m. through morning peak-hour gridlock, it is usually late. In any case, a service intended (optimistically) to reach Cork Bus Station at 10.15 is of little use to anyone working standard hours. In 2023, Deputy Pat Buckley gave the Dáil a grimly accurate picture of the town's bus service to Cork. "It does not make sense for connectivity that on the Cork-Waterford border, there is practically one bus, the Waterford bus, serving Cork city and the entire catchment area from Youghal to Killeagh and Castlemartyr". Many passengers board at Waterford and Dungarvan, with the result that "if five or six people get on the bus in Youghal, it is full and nobody can get on in Castlemartyr or Killeagh. This means children cannot get to school. More important, people have hospital appointments and so on. One family contacted me last week. They had to pay €100 for a taxi to go from Youghal to Cork University Hospital for an appointment."^[198]  The response to the Deputy's complaint was mildly bizarre. It is a venerable Dáil tradition that government responses to queries and pleas from backbenchers should be opaque, oblique and obtuse. Ministers are not to be blamed for this, since most of the time they simply read out twaddle drafted for them by civil servants, while the defence of the bureaucrats is that they provide what they assume the politicians want.^[199] Perhaps there are instances where the ritual is fit for a distinctly narrow purpose: the Deputy can assure constituents that an issue of concern to them has been raised, while the Minister has expressed a bottomless profundity of goodwill without blundering into any binding commitment. In a curious recent episode, Deputy Buckley asked for improvements to Local Link bus services around Midleton, but received a reply which proudly mentioned some development in Mullingar: from inside the M50, it is perhaps easy to confuse east Cork with Westmeath.^[200] But this kind of box-ticking minuet can hardly suffice when the TD is genuinely aroused by the issue, as Deputy Buckley most certainly was about overcrowding on Bus Éireann 40: "I often try to get the bus from Youghal to Midleton and I cannot get on it, even on a Saturday," he told the Dáil.

We should thus sympathise with Minister Niall Collins, who perhaps felt the ground trembling beneath him as he recited the prepared reply. It began with the usual mixture of declaration and disclaimer: "the Government is strongly committed to providing all citizens, including students, with reliable and realistic transport options" but "neither the Minister nor his officials are involved in the day-to-day operation of public transport services". He added that Bus Éireann had "advised that the average occupancy on its services from Youghal to Midleton this month has been 22 passengers on vehicles that have a maximum capacity of 53 passengers", and that only "nine out of its 248 scheduled services from Youghal to Midleton this September have reached capacity". "I do not believe that to be honest," was Deputy Buckley's riposte, and his scepticism would probably be widely shared.^[201]  

Deputy Buckley leaned towards diverting the Bus Éireann 40 service to Midleton railway station, allowing east Cork travellers to buy through tickets that would transfer to the train and whisk them into the city. The diversion (which, in the crowded streets of Midleton, would inevitably be slow) would hardly be fair on long-distance passengers wishing to connect with other services at the city's Parnell Place bus station. An alternative would be to run direct services from Youghal to the train, using the sixteen- to thirty-seater vehicles that are the mainstay of the Local Link. The problem here is that the terms 'express bus' and 'Midleton main street' are incompatible, nor can there be any guarantee that our imaginary Imokilly Flier will not be gridlocked in Castlemartyr with all the other peak-hour traffic. Buses do not run on air cushions: they need roads as much as any other vehicle. In major urban centres it is possible to give them priority by the creation of "Sustainable Transport Corridors" (in plainer English, bus lanes). It is planned to inflict these within the Cork metropolitan area, "but it is not planned to extend [them] to Midleton and Youghal", the Dáil was told in March 2026.^[202] It would not require the small change of a €100,000 scoping grant to establish that bus lanes are not an option in Castlemartyr.

[c; iii] Guided busway  Gradually a new idea emerged: if it was not possible to run a fast bus to Midleton station along the N25, why not do so alongside the greenway? In July 2023, Deputy David Stanton called for a feasibility study into the option of a guided busway. "Such services run like a tram but without tracks," he explained, arguing that the greenway would be wide enough "to have another active travel lane alongside … to facilitate a Bus Rapid Transit Service. This would provide exactly the same service as a train but one which could be put in place at a fraction of the cost and in a far shorter time as tracks and infrastructure such as signalling would not be needed." Deputy Stanton remained faithful to the construction of the two bypasses as part of "a new road from Midleton to Youghal, [but] it could take several years to come to pass".^[203] The idea gathered pace, and in April 2026 Cork County Councillors voted unanimously to press the project upon Transport Minister Darragh O'Brien. Members "agreed that the reintroduction of a railway line is many years away" and saw a rapid bus corridor as "an interim solution" which offered "the only viable option" to ease traffic congestion on the N25. Irish Rail was reported to have said there was "sufficient room along the route" for a busway and a railway line.^[204] Thus Cork County Council had committed itself to pressing for two projects, both single-track, the first of which would presumably become redundant should the second eventually materialise. This was certainly the hope expressed by one member of Cork City Council, who argued in March 2026 that "we should in the interim have a rapid bus transit system going from Midleton to Youghal".^[205] Unfortunately, Deputy Stanton's assumption that a guided busway would be much cheaper than reopening the railway seems unfounded. Furthermore, if the busway were ever built, it would almost certainly rule out any return of the trains in the foreseeable future.

The appropriate comparator scheme here is the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, claimed to be the longest rapid bus transit in the world. (For simplicity, I refer to it as the CGB and call its proposed east Cork imitation the YMCB.)^[206] The CGB uses 25 kilometres of former railway track (the Youghal-to-Midleton line is 23 kilometres), most of it linking to the Fenland town of St Ives to the north, with onward connection by road to the nearby historic town of Huntingdon. These two towns, which constitute the CGB's principal 'feeders', have a combined population of 42,000 – five times the size of Youghal. A further 13,000 people live at three intervening stopping points – about three times the size of Killeagh and Metro-Castlemartyr. The CGB also incorporates a shorter section of former railway which gives access to the city's hospital campus, and leads to a major park-and-ride facility on the southern edge of the city.  Buses are expertly navigated through the busy streets from the city centre, avoiding the kamikaze cyclists of the student population, until they reach the northern suburbs, where they are slotted into the concrete spillway laid along the former railway track. From this point, it is look-no-hands as the driver's role is limited to monitoring the automatic operation of the vehicle, providing a fail-safe should something go wrong at one of the level crossings. (Extendable horizontal guide wheels fix the buses within the concrete kerbs.) The population of the Cambridge urban area is over 180,000, slightly smaller than Cork. Within the city limits, the CGB serves two important employment clusters: in the north, the Cambridge Science Park, the core of 'Silicon Fen', where over 7,000 skilled workers are employed and, in the south, the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, claimed to be the largest centre of medical research in Europe, where 23,000 people work. As the home of an internationally renowned university with a dynamic, research-based economy, it was appropriate that Cambridge should invest in pioneering an experimental and imaginative public transport system, but that does not mean that the story has been a happy one, nor is it one that should be regarded as a model for emulation.

Obviously the CGB's potential passenger catchment is far larger than anything east Cork could offer. Unfortunately the costs of construction would be comparable. The CGB was budgeted to cost £116 million. By the time it opened, in 2011 (two years late), the total had risen to £181 million (roughly €210 million, depending on exchange rates). The city's Member of Parliament described the project as a "white elephant" and a local rail campaigner sweetly suggested that it might have been cheaper to bring back the trains. A proposal five years later for a second guided busway to link with satellite communities to the west of the city was drowned in a public outcry. Construction costs have escalated since 2011, and it is to be feared that Cork County Council has committed itself to supporting a project that would prove as expensive as the two bypasses. For once, that unhelpful entity, 'Dublin', might be justified in asking for some clarification of priorities.

Of course, the YMGB would no doubt benefit from lessons learned during the earlier pioneering project, notably in the provision of appropriate safety measures that only evolved after several fatal accidents, derailments and collisions.^[207] The CGB construction story ended unhappily partly because the local authority and the contractor became embroiled in legal action which added over £30 million to the taxpayers' bill. It should also be noted that the CGB is a dual system, with two concrete slipways side-by-side. YMGB supporters seem to envisage a smaller-scale project with just a single track. Unfortunately, much of the expenditure in any construction project consists of set-up costs, and it would be misleading to assume that there would be as much as a fifty-percent saving by building one busway rather than two. Furthermore, the implications of a single busway link need to be considered. The tracks on the CGB are 2.6 metres wide, and to make the YMGB coexist safely with the greenway, a high security fence would be required. This would take up a considerable slice of the existing 4-metre wide walking and cycling space – to the extent that it could become dangerous to combine those two activities – and would certainly cause a considerable reduction in amenity. In addition, some bridges are too narrow to permit the safe combination of greenway and busway.

If there is to be a single bus lane on the YMGB, would there be only one bus, constantly shuttling between Youghal and Midleton? This would severely restrict passenger capacity. If two vehicles were to be used, a midway passing place would be needed, and any delay in one direction would impact upon the schedule of the other. The CGB has been engineered to take double-deckers, and one might assume that there would be little point in spending so much money unless the largest buses could be used. (Both the Bus Éireann services from Youghal, 40 and 260, use double-deckers at some times of day.)  Cambridgeshire is famously flat: the St Ives branch line crossed few major roads and mainly relied upon level crossings. These have been adapted so that signals and gates are controlled from the approaching buses. The dozen-or-so bridges spanning the Midleton-to-Youghal line presumably needed little attention in the preparation of a greenway for pedestrians and cyclists, but there is no guarantee that even single-decker buses could pass under them. There would be a considerable engineering challenge in remodelling the N25 bridge at Killeagh, which is already hump-backed and is located close to village housing. The level crossing on the R633 at Ballyvergan would almost certainly have to be replaced by a bridge, since this is an important secondary route serving a broad swathe of countryside from Ballymacoda to Ladysbridge. In addition, a glance at Google Earth reveals that a remarkably large number of farmers have rights-of-way across the former railway track, and would reasonably claim the provision of expensive underpasses to safeguard movements of cattle.

Despite the controversies over its cost, the CGB can claim to have been some modest success in passenger numbers: it carried its millionth customer just over five months after it had opened. By 2017, 3.7 million journeys were being made on it annually, although that year the local authority sued the contractor once again, over a £36.5 million repair bill. (Campaigners for megaprojects do not always realise they come with maintenance costs.)  Yet the CGB has not met all expectations. Planners forecast 8,500 journeys each weekday by 2016: three years later, before Covid struck, the score was 7,000.^[208] In addition, an assessment of passenger numbers should note that the CGB also functions as a Luas for about five kilometres within the city limits. There is severe pressure on car parking at Addenbrooke's, the principal hospital on the Biomedical Campus, and visitors are strongly encouraged to use public transport. Seven thousand journeys each weekday equates to 3,500 people making return trips. Deduct substantial numbers boarding within Cambridge, and it would seem that the remarkably few of the 55,000 people who live along the route outside the city are daily commuters. We must face the blunt truth that, with a far smaller potential passenger catchment, east Cork would be hard-pressed to generate enough customers to cover running costs.

One additional advantage of the CGB is that it is making possible the development of a satellite town which is taking shape on what remains of the fields of Cambridgeshire, which is planned to be home to 24,000 people by 2040. Northstowe, as it is called, should confront both the campaigns for an east Cork railway or busway with a fundamental demographic challenge. Staggeringly, Cork's city area is projected to grow by over 100,000 people in the next fifteen years. Would it make regional sense to spread part of that population explosion by encouraging Youghal to become the size of Navan? Should a second Ballincollig be built in the meadows of Imokilly?  The implications of the revolution are breathtaking: instead of the railway or busway being developed to stimulate the local economy, the entire community would be enlarged and reshaped to make the train or the guided bus into a paying proposition. Government policy on infrastructure development in the twenty-twenties is firmly linked to the provision of much-needed housing. Hence demands to improve transport links for a static local population are unlikely to win approval: those who campaign for a railway or busway across east Cork need to ask whether they would wish their preferred scheme to be adopted as part of a package that would bring in many thousands of new residents.

Yet if the population of Youghal were to quadruple, the town would be forced to confront even more urgently to the issue of bypassing Killeagh and Castlemartyr, for access to the city by road would become all the more important. The CGB has a disappointing record in relation to travel times, especially since safety concerns have imposed speed limits: the guided bus along the concrete slipway from St Ives to the Cambridge Science Park, the same distance as from Youghal to Midleton, takes twenty minutes. With bypasses at Castlemartyr and Killeagh, plus the overdue construction of the Midleton northern relief road, an express bus from Youghal could reach the station there in much the same time.  If it also became possible for a direct service to glide over the obstacle of Lakeview, Glounthaune could be reached in 25 minutes or the planned new Dunkettle station within half an hour, feeding Youghal passengers on to the near-continuous train service from Cobh and Midleton and depositing them at Kent Station 40 minutes after leaving Youghal.^[209]  Why campaign to spend a huge amount of money on a long guided busway when a similar sum on two short relief roads would create so many more benefits?  To suggest that there is a choice between buses and bypasses is to posit a false antithesis.

The bigger picture At the time of writing, in July 2026, the Castlemartyr and Killeagh bypass projects have taken two steps forward, both important but neither as yet conclusive. A €6.8 million contract has been signed to take the schemes to the design stage, and there is now an overall price tag – perhaps it would be better called a 'ballpark' figure – of €100 to €250 million for their construction. Yet these developments, in themselves, do not guarantee that we are any closer to seeing bulldozers or ribbon-cutting. Much may happen between now and the 2030, the year when work might begin. It is only realistic to note some of the major challenges that Ireland faces.

Critical Infrastructure One potentially encouraging development is the enactment of the Critical Infrastructure Act, signed into law by President Connolly on 26 June 2026. This gives power to the Minister for Public Expenditure to designate projects as "critical infrastructure" and direct local authorities and other public bodies to prioritise them.^[210] Introducing the bill, Minister Jack Chambers announced that he intended to speed up "those projects or programmes that facilitate critical infrastructure across the energy, transport and water sectors with a particular focus on infrastructure that will support additional housing" although he admitted that "the legislation specifically does not preclude other infrastructure types". Critics have seized upon this lack of definition, arguing that it gives too much discretion to the government.^[211] The legislation aimed to "disapply" certain sections of the 2015 Climate Action Act from the planning process while, at the same time, maintaining the State's obligations to combat climate change through demands imposed by the European Union. It is not clear how these provisions will be reconciled: it may be that an attempt to reduce judicial challenges that, in the words of Minister Chambers, are "taken for ideological reasons, often steeped in a degrowth agenda" will in fact generate renewed campaigns of litigation. One potential problem is that, while the Act empowers the minister to direct public bodies to prioritise designated projects, it does not relieve them of their wider statutory obligations, the fandango of Gate Zeros and other hurdles which (as this essay has documented) have the effect of slowing the planning process. Giving ministers the power to tell public bodies to get a move on with snail-like procedures may simply prove an attempt to turbocharge a glacier.^[212]

In the summer of 2026, it is not clear how the speed-up provisions will be invoked, not least the government declined to specify the required administrative machinery before the Act was passed.^[213] Within the sphere of transport policy, much will depend upon the ability of the system to identify urgent and easily resolved problems like Castlemartyr. While the planning process clings to the fatuous fantasy that the N25 forms part of some mythical autobahn between Letterkenny and Waterford, it will presumably continue to ignore or deny the road's importance as the key link between Cork and Rosslare. Ordering public bodies to accelerate existing procedures in itself does nothing to address the stuttering gaps within the framework of working towards any new project. TII and Cork County Council might well complete the preliminary work in record time – selecting the route, counting the badgers, excavating the ancient sites and estimating the greenhouse gases – but little will be gained if they are then sent to the back of another queue to discover whether funding might be available twelve months later to unleash the bulldozers. If the government is going to use the stick of pressing State bodies to hurry up, it should also offer the carrot of advance guaranteed cash, the much discussed element of multi-annual funding that limits the ability of the Department of Finance to throw its budgetary spanner into still imaginary works.^[214]

The tax base Shifting the basis of the Irish economy from farmer to pharma has produced massive sums of windfall income from Corporation Tax. Everyone seems to recognise that Ireland has become dangerously dependent upon receipts paid by a small number of international companies. Barely a week passes without a think-tank or an international agency warning that the golden geese may take wings and depart. In 2024, Corporation Tax generated 29 percent of the State's revenue, and forty percent of that was paid by two companies: one-ninth of the government's income flowed from just two contributors.^[215] Corporation Tax comes mainly from the hi-tech sector, some of it levied on profits generated outside the country. These companies, which also contribute to income tax through the creation of employment in Ireland, are mostly American-owned, which means that are under pressure to relocate their manufacturing to the United States and to subject their profits to taxation by Washington.  Part of this windfall income is now being channelled into 'rainy day' funds to prepare for the possibility that the flow may very likely be reduced in the years ahead. Some bemusement was felt in June 2026 when it emerged that the government was borrowing cash to meet its own savings targets.^[216] Fortunately, this strange transaction does not seem to have been reported overseas, where it would no doubt have triggered negative stereotypes. It is a measure of the failure of the system of government that the State has failed to deal with the relatively small but intolerable problems of Castlemartyr and Killeagh in fiscal good times. It may find it even harder to respond in the years ahead.^[217]

Health and defence The State also faces relentless and implacable pressures to spend more money. Two major areas may be mentioned, if only by way of illustration. It is clear from repeated news bulletins that several major hospitals around the country require urgent and massive investment. In addition, by 2024, the predicted cost of National Children's Hospital Ireland had risen to around two and a quarter billion Euro, almost four times the original estimate of a decade earlier. The opening is reported to have been postponed nineteen times, and (as of July 2026) there is no firm date for its completion. More expenditure, possibly including costly litigation, may be expected. In addition, the 2025 Programme for Government promised to build four new elective hospitals and establish six new surgical hubs around the country, while exploring the provision of a seventh "for the North West in a timely manner". ^[218] Most informed voters will recognise that these health care projects are not simply priorities but imperatives, and they are also astronomically expensive.

There is probably much less widespread public awareness of the need for a considerable increase in expenditure in another field, defence. The 2026 Defence Forces budget, €1.5 billion, represents a one-third increase over four years, and the Programme for Government specifically refers to the need to "strengthen our Defence capabilities in light of the changed geopolitical landscape since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine". Even so, Ireland plans to allocate only 0.3 percent of Gross National Product on defence, and the country would need to spend seven times as much to match the European Union average.^[219] In addition to the traditional military and naval agendas, there are major deficiencies in defence capabilities in the air and on the seabed.^[220] Equally pressing is the largely new domain of cyberwarfare, particularly important given the State's economic dependence upon the hi-tech sector. Perhaps most basic of all are the issues of recruitment and retention. Ireland is well served by the quality of its Defence Forces personnel, but their commitment and professionalism have not been matched by appropriate pay and conditions.^[221] It is probably no exaggeration to predict that the country may have to allocate a National Children's Hospital-sized budget every year to meeting the basic responsibility of a sovereign State that it should protect its own people.^[222]

The imperative needs of these two areas alone, Health and Defence, will create foreboding about the prospects of other projects, and all the more so because government finances tend to be blown off course by sudden crises of public protest. In February 2026, the government bowed to a vocal campaign that demanded more special needs assistants in the schools. As a result, a €600 million overspend emerged in the Department of Education three months later. The Minister for Public Expenditure decreed that other departments must reduce cut their spending by up to 1.4 percent to keep the overall budget within planned limits for the year. However, the so-called 'front-line' services, Health and Social Protection, were to be largely exempt from the cuts. If such emergency surgery were to be repeated in 2030, there is a real danger that '1.4 percent of a departmental budget' would look remarkably like 'small bypass in deepest Munster'.^[223] Meanwhile, widespread and disruptive protests against the high cost of oil products in April had been appeased by a package of cuts in fuel duty coupled with targeted subsidies that were estimated to cost the government €700 million. In July 2026, the reduced levels of taxation at the pumps were extended in tapered form until the end of the year, involving a further reduction in revenue of about €270 million. Thus the likely cost of these concessions to cost-of-living campaigners will be close to one billion Euro, and further remissions cannot be ruled out. This sum equals the outline price-tags for four east Cork transport projects: the railway to Youghal (€350 million), the Castlemartyr and Killeagh bypasses (€250 million), the Cobh access road (€250 million) and the Midleton-Carrigtohill dual carriageway upgrade (€100 million). Two campaigns of public protest in two months forced the government to divert very large sums to emergency appeasement measures. It is likely that this will happen again, and capital projects will almost certainly suffer.

Metrolink Then there is the Dublin Metro. We may all accept that the capital city has reached the size and sophistication that requires an underground railway system, although veterans of the Castlemartyr tailbacks will perhaps smile at its much-vaunted selling point, that Metrolink will make it possible to travel from the city centre to the airport in twenty minutes – about the average queueing time it takes to get through the village at peak hours. No doubt it will be an inspirational project but, and it is a very big 'but', at this stage it does seem to be based on a very elastic approach to budgeting. TII's 2022 business plan identified €9.5 billion as a credible midpoint in a range of estimates rising to €12.25 billion. Ministers had been privately briefed that a 'worst case scenario' might virtually double that figure to around €23 billion, about ninety times the cost of bypassing Castlemartyr and Killeagh. In July 2026, an official pointed out that construction costs had increased by thirty percent since the earlier estimate and warned that the final bill "will be well north of €9 billion".^[224] The tender price for Dublin Port Tunnel in 2000 was €457 million; by the time it opened in 2006, it had cost €752 million. The tunnel under the Shannon at Limerick was budgeted at €355 million, but costs rose by 86 percent during its six-year construction period, and the eventual bill in 2010 was €660 million. There must be real fears that the Dublin Metro will prove to be a hole in the ground that will swallow cash, and particularly devour funding allocated for humbler schemes. National pride alone will require that the project must succeed, whatever the cost: we have only to consider the damage inflicted on British prestige by the crumbling of the hapless HS2 rail project to appreciate that Ireland would become an international laughing stock if Dublin's planned Metro ran out of cash.

The system of government has failed Castlemartyr and Killeagh in relatively good times. It remains to be seen if it can redeem itself in the years of constraint and uncertainty that lie ahead. I close by quoting a cry from heart on social media in 2025: "how in the name of jaysus did they not bypass Castlemartyr years ago!!!"

ENDNOTES  I have supplied references for major statements and reports, but not for general news items that are easily traced on the Internet. Websites were consulted in June and July 2026. AI information tendered by search engines has been checked against other sources. Officials of public bodies are not identified by name, but I take opportunity to acknowledge their commitment to major schemes and their evident frustration at the lack of funding that prevents their realisation. References for anonymous comments from social media are mostly omitted, and I have removed expletives.

^[1] The road from Waterford to Tallow, engineered in 1791 was "commonly known as the Military Road". Waterford Mail, 8 November 1828. Over 130 kilometres of roads were built in north-west Cork and nearby areas of Kerry after unrest in 1821-2. J.S. Donnelly, jr, The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork … (London, 1965), 27-8.

^[2] This was no mere branch-line. It included the longest railway bridge in the country, a 650-metre structure across the Barrow.

^[3] The Castlemartyr bottleneck is replicated on a slightly smaller scale by another wayside village, Killeagh, six kilometres further east. Here the village street is a little longer and, with half the population, the local traffic is less intense. Nonetheless, the arguments for eliminating the chokepoint apply here too and, for simplicity, references in this essay to Castlemartyr should generally be interpreted as 'and Killeagh'. Both at Castlemartyr and Killeagh, the village street terminates in a right-angled bend, meaning that the N25 forms two sides of a triangle at either approach. This configuration considerably simplifies the selection of a bypass route at each place, since the vacant hypotenuse dictates the general line of any relief road. In 1861, a Cork local historian called Killeagh a "pretty town, or village", although twelve years earlier the curmudgeonly Scot Thomas Carlyle could only comment that it was "a poor village, brook at this end, remember little of it". Compared with Castlemartyr, it has a low-key streetscape, with some interesting buildings scattered along a five-hundred metre frontage. Like its neighbour, Killeagh's village street has a right-angled bend at one end, which is also the junction with a minor road. The Catholic parish church adjoins the bend, although there is plenty of parking off the N25. Pedestrian lights, the turn-off to Mogeely and a village school are additional complications, and the departing westbound traveller must negotiate the final hazard of a defunct railway bridge, now spanning the greenway, which is both hump-backed and skewed. (It was rebuilt in the 1920s after damage in the Irish Civil War.) There has recently been a small-scale development of town houses with access to the main street just beyond the bend. The local population has increased from the 526 recorded in 2006 and must now be close to Cork County Council's 2028 target of 1,150 people. The 2022 Cork County Plan spoke of Killeagh in worthy generalities. It describes the village "a service centre to a large hinterland and local employment is provided in the shops and services": indeed, at least 14 businesses operate along the village street, and there is also a creative arts hub. "In terms of transportation and connectivity Killeagh is extremely fortunate in that it lies on both the N25 National Primary route which forms part of the Atlantic Corridor linking the gateway cities of Cork and Waterford and on the former railway line between Cork and Youghal." The advantages of a line of railway that has neither track nor trains were not explained. The Plan noted that Killeagh's primary school was located on a restricted main street site but "is within walking distance of all residential areas, however at peak periods, parents dropping and collecting children causes further traffic congestion on the main street." A site for a new school had been identified outside the village, which would presumably increase the number of pupils travelling by car, adding to congestion in the absence of a bypass. "The scale and form of development will be very much dependant [sic] on improvements to the village’s infrastructure including the provision of a new water supply scheme and completion of the Killeagh bypass to the south of the village which will alleviate the congestion currently experienced in the village." The waste water plant was upgraded in 2025; the bypass awaits. The traffic problem is slightly less than that of Castlemartyr. On Friday 22 May 2026, 16,007 vehicles travelled the main road, 839 of them trucks (326 fixed-cab trucks and 513 articulated HGVs). C. B. Gibson, The History of the County and City of Cork (2 vols, London, 1861), ii, 483; Carlyle, Reminiscences of my Irish Journey in 1849 (London, 1882), 112-13; https://www.corkcoco.ie/sites/default/files/2022-06/volume-4-south-cork.pdf;  

https://trafficdata.tii.ie/calendar_alt.asp?sgid=XZOA8M4LR27P0HAO3_SRSB&spid=92A2A694FE86.

^[4] https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-40146194.html. Cycling to school is, of course, not a safe option.

^[5] "Traffic counters record hourly traffic volumes by vehicle class, e.g. motorcycle, car, goods vehicles distinguished by number of axles etc. with up to twelve vehicle classes being identified. Vehicles are detected by passing over loops embedded in the road surface. The data enables identification of vehicle profiles and classes." https://www.tii.ie/en/roads-tolling/operations-and-maintenance/traffic-count-data/. Statistics for the N25 between Castlemartyr and Midleton (both places are incorrectly spelt) are at https://trafficdata.tii.ie/calendar_alt.asp?sgid=XZOA8M4LR27P0HAO3_SRSB&spid=5229D2644906.

^[6] On Thursday 21 May 2026, the Loughaderra sensors counted 17,969 vehicles, 1,043 of them trucks. On Friday 22 May 2026, the total was 18,334 vehicles, 990 of them trucks: motorists leaving Cork for the weekend make the village a notorious bottleneck on Friday afternoons. Between 6 in the morning and 8 at night, the hourly flow never dipped below one thousand, rising above 1,200 between 7 and 9 a.m. and again from 5 to 6 p.m. – at peak hours, twenty vehicles a minute. Cars made up four-fifths of the traffic (14,862, 81.4 percent). Light Goods Vehicles (LGVs, i.e. vans) comprised about one-eighth of the total (2,171, 11.84 percent). HGVs are divided into two categories, rigid, where the driver's cab forms part of the overall machine, and articulated, which are constructed like road trains and are generally larger. There were 410 of the former and 580 of the latter. Although there are fewer trucks at weekends, the total traffic burden drops by only around 500, recreational motorists presumably replacing commuters. The vehicle categories peak at different times. Two hundred vans pass through between 7 and 8 a.m., with another influx (172) from noon to one o'clock, presumably explained by deliveries. Forty-seven rigid HGVs pass through between 8 and 9 in the morning, suggesting that these (slightly) smaller trucks are mainly operated by Munster companies working regular hours. However, fifty of the heavier articulated HGVs were counted between 6 and 7 in the morning, and there was one every sixty seconds between 10 and 11, probably 'pulses' created by round-the-clock ferry schedules. In the smaller but still bulky categories, 98 caravans sped through Loughaderra on 22 May 2026: the figure is usually over one hundred a day in the summer months, and caravanners remain active into October. There were 156 buses, about one hundred more than are provided by scheduled services. School bus services probably explain the peak of 22 between 4 and 5 in the afternoon. Scheduled bus services are few and (through no fault of their operator, Bus Éireann) unreliable in time-keeping.

^[7] Its juddering bends have poor visibility, and the speeding motorist may well suddenly encounter an unexpected and leisurely tractor. Traffic attempting to turn right in the main street of Killeagh is a significant cause of congestion in the morning rush hour, and there are tailbacks in the evening as drivers try to ease their way into the main road crawl. Rejoining the N25 at Two Mile Inn is a challenge. Indeed, many westbound motorists peel off along potholed backroads to gain access to Midleton station through the modern suburb of Broomfield, whose residents have to be protected by a Loch Ness Monster of speed bumps. . The Mogeely and Ladysbridge rat-runs were reported as far back as 2019: https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-40146194.html. When part of the road was closed for resurfacing in March 2026, there were expressions of horror on social media, e.g., "Mogeely route closed for the week which means an absolute nightmare commuting eastbound on the N25." In fact the closure was for two weeks. The daily traffic volume passing Loughaderra rose by over 1,100 vehicles between 24 and 31 March.

^[8] The total in March 2019 was 498,818: in March 2026, an almost identical figure of 502,461.

^[9] Given that my appetite for statistics is finite, I chose at random to compare a Thursday in June 2015 (the 11th) with the same Thursday (the 12th) ten years later. Overall traffic numbers actually fell, although only by 130, from 17,455 to 17,325, but heavy goods vehicles increased by 221, from 747 to 968: rigid (fixed-cab) HGVs by 110, articulated mammoths by 111. Not only is the overall traffic passing through Castlemartyr steadily becoming heavier, but so are the individual vehicles. In 2015, Ireland agreed to raise the weight limit of trucks to 46 tonnes, an increase of four tonnes, causing even more pressure upon road surfaces. It should also be noted that the shift towards electric vehicles also has the capacity to cause damage since, at the present stage of development, the required batteries are bulky. In late April 2026, Cork County Council undertook resurfacing work in the main street of Castlemartyr between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. "Expect Delays," it warned drivers. "Please use alternative routes where possible." For 46-tonne trucks travelling to and from a port that is open at all hours, this was a tall order. Recent construction at the Midleton distillery probably accounts for some of the HGV movements through Castlemartyr, but there will always be large-scale projects in process within the region.

^[10] Sunday Tribune, 20 October 1991.

^[11] https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-40146194.html.

^[12] Waterford boasts "uncongested road connections to the rest of Ireland". Rosslare over-ambitiously claims it is "90 minutes from Dublin, Cork and Limerick cities: https://www.portofwaterford.com/the-port/key-information/; https://www.rosslareeuroport.ie/en-ie/about.

^[13] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2025-03-04/104/.

^[14] "Day and night throughout the year passengers and freight come and leave through Rosslare Harbour. Foot passengers, car passengers, motorcyclists, coach travellers and caravanners make their way to and from Rosslare. Freight operators drive their Ro-On Ro-Off vehicles through the port along with freight vehicles carrying tractors and other machinery, industrial products and food. Car-carrying ships bring their cargoes of new cars to Rosslare where they are stored for further transit throughout Ireland." This was an ecstatic glimpse offered by the Irish Independent on 14 September 1989. Rosslare has become a great deal busier since.

^[15] I have rounded the figures. In 2010, Rosslare handled 119,911 loaded trucks, carrying 2.481 million tonnes of freight, plus 2,415 empty heavy goods vehicles. 274,012 cars, caravans and motor bicycles also passed through. In 2025, there were 220,813 loaded trucks carrying 3,585,000 million tonnes of freight, and a further 4,424 that were empty. The number of cars etc. fell slightly to 237,599, probably the result of Covid and higher tourism costs. Loaded truck movements through the port of Dublin have fallen by about 60,000 since 2020, suggesting that freight traffic from the continent that formerly used the Holyhead land bridge now travels direct to Rosslare.

https://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/releasespublications/documents/transport/2010/spt_2010.pdf;   https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/spt/statisticsofporttrafficquarter4year2020/;

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-spt/statisticsofporttrafficquarter4andyear2025/.

^[16] One incidental advantage of these new routes is that they are long enough for truck drivers to take their compulsory rest periods between shifts while they are at sea: the shortest voyage, to and from Cherbourg, takes seventeen hours, the others are above twenty-four. This means that, on arriving in Ireland, they can head non-stop for their destinations, possibly causing pulses of heavy container traffic in distant bottlenecks.

^[17] https://www.rosslareeuroport.ie/en-ie/about.

^[18] A 30-km road link from Rosslare to the N11, which leads to Dublin, was in the planning stage in 2024, when "wide ranging ecology surveys" were in progress, looking for "badgers, otters, birds, bats, and barn owls". These are very worthy exercises but one hopes they will not take too long. https://oilgate2rosslareharbour.ie/latest-news/.

^[19] Irish Examiner, 23 August 2007. The term 'fast-track' was rarely used thereafter.

^[20] Throughout 2024-5, the highways and boreens of east Cork were disrupted by the installation of the Celtic Interconnector, a worthy project that will allow the purchase of electricity from France to keep the lights on in Dublin. The cables follow long stretches of the N25, but it has not escaped notice on social media that they skirt Castlemartyr to the north, indeed branching off the N25 at more or less the point where a bypass would begin on the Youghal side of the village. The fact that the two schemes were not combined is a notable instance of the absence of joined-up thinking, but at least the Interconnector has settled the question of the route. This is also true at Killeagh. The scars left by the Interconnector can be seen at both places on Google Earth. 

^[21] https://www.tii.ie/media/4sjlfdra/n25-waterford-bypass-opening-brochure.pdf.

^[22] https://www.n25newross.ie/  (Transport Infrastructure Ireland). 

^[23] https://x.com/JamesOConnorTD/status/2050647314167971899  (2 May 2026).

^[24] https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41852607.html.

^[25] https://irishmotorwayinfo.com/inex/roads/m25/m25.html.

^[26]https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4921919/4910917?HighlightText=castlemartyr&Route=stories&SearchLanguage=ga 

^[27] H. Townsend, A General and Statistical Survey of the County of Cork (2 vols, Cork, 2nd ed., 1815, cf. 1st ed. 1810), ii, Addenda, 36-8. As late as 1824, the south-western corner of County Waterford, the barony of Decies Within Drum, hemmed in by the Drum Hills, was still dependent on water transport and the packhorse: "the produce of the land can only be conveyed to the adjoining markets, by sending it coastwise in boats, or by the agency of miserable horses, who carry it on their backs over the almost impassable footways." R.H. Ryland, The History, Topography and Antiquities of the County and City of Waterford... (London, 1824), 323. This would change a decade later when a new highway (the future N25) was driven over the hills between Killongford and Kinsalebeg.

^[28] I rely extensively in this section on the impressive work of David Dickson: D. Dickson, Old World Colony … (Cork, 2005), esp. 427-36.

^[29] Edward Wakefield explained the procedure for making a new road in 1812. "The making or repairing of roads in this country is effected in the following manner: any person who wishes to have a new road constructed, presents a memorial to the Grand Jury at the assizes, with an affidavit of its necessity. A deliberation then takes place upon the subject, and if the jury allow the presentment, the road is either made or repaired, as the case requires; the accounting presentment is sworn to, and must receive the sanction of the judge [who presided over the Grand Jury]. The 'undertaker', or maker of the road, afterwards procures an order from the Grand Jury to receive the money from the treasurer of the county. In the mean time it is liable to be traversed [contested] by any landholder in the barony, on his giving the parish twenty-one days' notice of his intention to oppose it at the assizes. Mail-coach roads are determined upon by his Majesty's Post-master General, and the expense is defrayed by a tax imposed on the county." This was certainly simpler than the modern planning process. E. Wakefield, An Account of Ireland… (2 vols, London, 1812), i, 657.

^[30] Among the advantages attributed to Youghal bridge when it opened in 1832 were "the transmission of the mail, the marching of troops": Waterford Chronicle, 4 February 1832.

^[31] C. Smith, The Antient and Present State of the County and City of Cork... (2 vols, Dublin, 1750), i, 133-4. Later editions amended the title to 'Ancient'. The N25 was so designated in 1977. Midleton had been established by the landlord Brodricks around 1670, "deriving its name from its situation on the road from Youghal to Cork at a nearly equal distance from each place". It is not clear how the north-south axis of the main street related to the existing main road or where it ran at that time. Lewis's statement that "a new line of road … forming a handsome western entrance" had been created since the opening of the distillery in 1824 probably refers only to a short section of the highway close to the modern Midleton Hotel, known as the New Cork Road. T. Cadogan, ed., Lewis' Cork… (Cork, 1998, text of S. Lewis, Topographical Dictionary … [1837]), 354-5.

^[32] F. Keohane, Cork City and County (The Buildings of Ireland) (New Haven, Conn., 2020), 304, quoting a critic from 1788. Henry Boyle's mansion is now the hotel at the centre of the Castlemartyr Resort. The construction history of the mansion is not clear, not least since it seems to have been erected in stages. Charles Smith's evidence seems to imply that the highway diversion had happened some time before 1750. Boyle was actively building in the 1720s, and the Castlemartyr village bend probably dates from that time, making it 300 years old. Dr Ian d'Alton observed that, in County Cork by 1800, "the grand jury (which was the preserve of the larger landowners) had shaped the roads somewhat to the needs of its individual members". Mitchelstown Castle and Moore Park were other demesnes where powerful owners had barred highways. In 1765, the Irish Parliament forbade the construction of roads through deer parks or any enclosure within a five-foot (1.52 metre) wall, the usual marker of a landlord demesne. I. d'Alton, Protestant Society and Politics in Cork 1812-1844 (Cork, 1980), 4.

^[33] In December 1846, Famine relief projects included £200 for the "cutting of the hill at Lord Shannon's gate" and £70 to "complete the parapet wall on Castlemartyr-road". These items may explain the narrow trench-section of the N25 immediately on its emergence westward from the village street. Both were ongoing schemes which probably originated after August 1846 food riot in Castlemartyr. Cork Constitution, 8 December 1846.

^[34] R. Caulfield, ed., The Council Book of the Corporation of Youghal... (Guildford, Surrey, 1878), 453, 536. Youghal had petitioned the Irish Parliament for such a road in 1757. At that time, the town was campaigning for improved navigation of the Blackwater, which explains its interest in Lismore. There is much fascinating information about Youghal's riverine hinterland in N. O'Brien, Blackwater and Bride… (Ballyduff Upper, Waterford, 2008).

^[35] Caulfield, ed., The Council Book of the Corporation of Youghal, 316, 346, 453.

^[36] Dublin Journal, 21 January 1809

^[37] Saunders's News-Letter, 8 August 1839; F. Keohane, Cork City and County (The Buildings of Ireland) (New Haven, Conn., 2020), 457-8. Brooke's improvements can still be seen in Glenbower Wood.

^[38] Taylor and Skinner's Maps of the Roads of Ireland (2nd ed., 1783, cf. 1st ed. 1778), Map 130.

^[39] It is worth noting that a Cork-to-Waterford motorway, if it ever materialises, may also follow a northerly route, avoiding Midleton and Youghal altogether. The south coast of Ireland runs not west-east but roughly north-north-east from Mizen Head to Carnsore Point. Waterford City is on a latitude 60 kilometres north of Cork.

^[40] Townsend, A General and Statistical Survey of the County of Cork, ii, Addenda, 38. The examples of post-1815 road-building given by J.S. Donnelly, The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork… (London, 1975), 27-8 mostly refer to land reclamation projects in the west of the county. Lewis' Topographical Dictionary of 1837 makes frequent references to new mail-coach roads. The phrase "New Line" sometimes survives as a local road name. The initiative for most road improvements was taken in the localities by Grand Juries (i.e. the landowners who had to meet the cost), but the upgrading of the highways also strengthened central government control. Repression of discontent in 1797-8 had rested upon the ability to move militia regiments around the country, e.g. from north Cork to Wexford.

^[41] Townsend, A General and Statistical Survey of the County of Cork, ii, Addenda, 39. The largest HGVs, 46-tonne trucks, have a legal maximum width of 2.55 metres.

^[42] https://turtlebunbury.wordpress.com/2016/07/18/1816-the-year-without-a-summer/. Waterford farmers, in the sunny south-east, managed to save some of their crops.

^[43] The Cork Hill route, outside the town's North Gate, was clearly marked in Taylor and Skinner's 1778 road atlas.

^[44] Belfast News-Letter, 1 November 1816. The line of road cut through two existing fields east of Burgess and it may have been here that the pikes were discovered. The old road along the ridge was closed by the building of the Youghal bypass.

^[45] The Hand-Book for Youghal (Youghal, facsimile ed. 1973 of 1896 ed.), 81.

^[46] H.D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834... (2 vols, London, 1835), i, 175. The original road still leads to Claycastle. In addition to being narrow (as it still is), it is vulnerable to storm damage.

^[47] The Hand-Book for Youghal (based on the recollections of a Protestant clergyman, Samuel Hayman) dates the changes to the construction of the Devonshire Arms Hotel in 1826, when major excavation works behind the hotel site destroyed the last remains of the medieval South Abbey. However, it is clear that the main changes had been made in 1817, when the Church of Ireland chapel of ease had been erected to serve the respectable classes of the growing southern district, and were intended to connect with the new road from Killeagh. D. Kelly and T. O'Keeffe, Youghal: Irish Towns Historic Atlas, no. 27 (Dublin, 2015), Map 14 and cf. The Hand-Book for Youghal, 84.

^[48] Cork Free Press, 27 October; Cork Examiner, 1 November 1910. A handsome esplanade was eventually constructed in the 1960s after massive storm damage. (Information from Mike Hackett.)

^[49] It is noteworthy that plans for (usually short) canals in the region generally made no progress, even though they were specifically intended to shift kelp and sand. Lewis (1837) referred to stalled projects for canals from Colliers Quay (downriver from Bandon) to Innishannon and Dunmanway, and from Menane (now Minane) Bridge to Tracton. Near Dungarvan, it was proposed in 1836 to canalise the river Brickey, thereby giving inland districts "an opportunity of procuring sea weed, and other manure, with even much less inconvenience than at present" (the formula suggests good roads). A more ambitious scheme in 1845 envisaged an 18-km canal from Killongford on the Brickey to the upper Blackwater, via the Finisk near Cappoquin, thereby diverting produce from Youghal market to Dungarvan. Charles Smith had suggested this link almost a century earlier. Writing in 1750, Smith had also suggested that only a "small expence [sic]" was needed to allow "boats and lighters" to come up the river Kiltha from the coast as far as Castlemartyr. In 1846, it was claimed that the Earl of Shannon had considered canalising the river Womanagh to Ladysbridge around 1800: there was a fall of about 1.4 metres between Ladysbridge and the head of tides 6 kms downstream (small enough, it was presumably implied, to be handled through a single lock). Once again, "carting sand" was argued as the main advantage. The fact that these superficially plausible schemes made no progress seems to suggest that the road network (including secondary local byways) was satisfactory. More promising projects on the middle and upper Blackwater similarly made little headway. Edward Wakefield in 1812 advised against investing in a canal to open up the Duhallow coal field in north Cork. "New lines of road, where the old are objectionable, and a strict attention to the repairs of those already constructed, will answer the principal purposes of commercial intercourse, if not with equal, at least with ample sufficiency."  A short stretch of canal near Lismore, opened in 1796, now forms part of an attractive approach to the town on the N72 from the east, and is popular with waterfowl. Tipperary Free Press, 30 April 1836; Southern Reporter, 23 December 1845; C. Smith, The Antient and Present State of the County and City of Waterford (ed. D. Brady, Waterford, 2008, based on the 2^nd ed., 1774), 196; Smith, The Antient and Present State of the County and City of Cork, i, 136; Southern Reporter, 24 March 1846; Dickson, Old World Colony, 433-4; Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, i, 620. The central government funded commissioners for "inland navigation" from 1752 to 1777 and again from 1800, the second body being absorbed into the Board of Works in 1831. These organisations focused on major projects, such as the Royal Canal and the improvement of the Shannon. R.B. McDowell, The Irish Administration 1801-1914 (London, 1964), 198-200, 204-6.

^[50]  Dickson, Old World Colony, 113-70.

^[51] D. Dickson, "Butter Comes to Market…", in P. O'Flanagan and C.G. Buttimer, eds,  Cork: History & Society… (Templeogue, Dublin, 1993), 367-90, esp. 371.

^[52] H. Townsend, A General and Statistical Survey of the County of Cork (2 vols, Cork, 2nd ed., 1815, cf. 1st ed. 1810), ii, 85-6, 92. Imokilly is the barony in the east of County Cork.

^[53] Cork Examiner, 31 March 1845.

^[54] E.g. the passing allusions to "excellent roads" near Blarney and Mallow, Cadogan, ed., Lewis' Cork, 242, 347. The Waterford historian R.H. Ryland simply noted that "smooth and level roads have introduced the use of wheel carriages". Ryland, The History, Topography and Antiquities of the County and City of Waterford, 323.

^[55] Inglis, Ireland in 1834, i, 80-1. Cornelius Kelly pointed out that it was the improved road system that attracted the early-19^th century visitors. C. Kelly, The Grand Tour of Cork (Allihies, 2003), ix. Bianconi's network of passenger services, founded at Clonmel in 1814, was generally admired.

^[56] Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, i, 659, 656. Road building continued in County Cork to the eve of the Famine: 666 miles were reported to have been constructed between 1820 and 1843. If this measurement was in English miles, it equalled 1,072 kms. The Irish mile, used unofficially, was 27% longer. d'Alton, Protestant Society and Politics in Cork 1812-1844, 37. The distance covered indicates that much of the improvement in this period was directed at local secondary routes. 

^[57] London publisher John Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Ireland (1866), xlv.

^[58] W.M. Thackeray, The Irish Sketchbook of 1842 (Dublin, 2005 ed., cf. 1^st ed. 1843), 89 (7 mph is equal to 11.27 kph). Thackeray was aboard a rival coach, The Skibbereen Perseverance, which, as its name suggested, did not aspire to such speed.

^[59] Waterford Mirror, 7 April 1832; Donnelly, The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork… (London, 1975), 28. For the Drum Hills at this time, see also Ged Martin, "Mountstuart church, Toor, County Waterford": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/398-mountstuart-church

^[60] Thackeray, The Irish Sketchbook of 1842, 50; Dickson, Old World Colony, 294.

^[61] W.J. Smyth, "Social, Economic and Landscape Transformations…" in O'Flanagan and Buttimer, eds, Cork: History & Society, 655-98, esp. 695-6.

^[62] Waterford News, 2 November 1849.

^[63] Cork Examiner, 7 October 1846. The townland is Ballindinis.

^[64] It should be acknowledged that many sections of the N25 have been widened. In some places (e.g. the 8.4 km Kilmacthomas realignment, completed in 2001), the opportunity to create a dual carriageway was sadly missed. Critics regard the N25 as one of Ireland's most dangerous roads: over 1,000 collisions have been reported between 2020 and 2026, with 13 people killed. Irish Independent, 2 April 2026: https://www.independent.ie/county/cork/over-1000-collisions-and-13-deaths-recorded-on-n25-since-2020/a/145020945.html.

^[65] Dickson, Old World Colony, 149, 221, 284. For Midleton and Ballincurra, P. O'Flanagan, "Three Hundred Years of Urban Life…" in O'Flanagan and Buttimer, eds, Cork: History & Society, 391-467, esp. 438.

^[66] Dickson, Old World Colony, 430, 563. Around 1805, a spur road was constructed from a point east of Cappoquin to the Ferry Point opposite Youghal. Now (mostly) the R671, it still provides the only route south from the important provincial town of Clonmel.

^[67] Thackeray, The Irish Sketchbook of 1842, 53.

^[68] J. Martin, Dungarvan / Dún Garbhán (Irish Historic Towns Atlas No. 30) (Dublin, 2020), 5-6, 22.

^[69] The Hand-Book for Youghal, 83. Hayman dated the completion of the new road to Tallow to about 1819, and this date appears on the bridge.

^[70] O'Flanagan, "Three Hundred Years of Urban Life", 423. As late as 1817, mail was carried from Youghal to Cork by runners, in relays of athletic young men.

^[71] The legislation was opposed by the Broderick (Lord Waterford) interest, and only passed with conditions which explain some of the bridge's subsequent problems.

^[72] Waterford Mirror, 15 November 1828. In 1808, a group of about 20 people chartered a boat to take them across the Blackwater from Youghal after the official ferry operator refused to carry them in bad weather. They were all drowned. There were further tragedies in 1837, when 17 people were died in the capsizing of an overloaded boat, and in 1876, when 13 people were drowned in heavy rain. Belfast News-Letter, 15 January 1808; http://kinsalebeg.com/chapters/ferrypoint/ferrypoint.html#27 and http://kinsalebeg.com/chapters/ferrypoint/ferrypoint.html#32. 

^[73] Waterford Chronicle, 4 February 1832.

^[74] Waterford Chronicle, 4 February 1832: "a new line of communication is now formed with Youghal".

^[75] Waterford Mail, 20 June 1835.

^[76] Waterford Mirror, 8 January 1831; 7 April 1832.

^[77] The R615 in the north-eastern suburbs of Cork City is still known as the Old Youghal Road, which presumably continued through Glanmire (where a late-eighteenth-century bridge crosses the Glashaboy river) and Glounthane. A 2 kilometre section of the Lower Glanmire Road to Dunkettle was widened in 1840. In 1842 the section of the road approaching the city was in a "lamentable condition…. almost impassable … torn up into dangerous ruts and deep tracks, out of which it is nearly impossible to free the wheels of any car or coach…. The ordinary stage coaches, daily running along this line of road, are compelled to crawl over this … at the rate of four miles an hour", delaying the arrival of the mail from Dublin by ten minutes. Southern Reporter, 30 July 1840; Cork Examiner, 28 November 1842. It is possible that the Lower Glanmire Road owes its origin to a decision by Cork Corporation in 1736 to create "a beautiful outlet for wheel carriages" apparently along the north bank of the Lee, "provided two coaches may go abreast commodiously" at high tide.  But the Corporation had referred to "the old Road to Youghal" four years earlier. R. Caulfield, ed., The Council Book of the Corporation of the City of Cork... (Guildford, Surrey, 1876), 557-8, 508. Although this would make the Lower Glanmire Road a relatively early highway project, it would match the assumed date of Henry Boyle's diversion at Castlemartyr.

^[78] Cork Constitution, 25 August 1827; Waterford Mail, 23 February 1866; Southern Reporter, 30 May 1865; https://waterfordcouncil.ie/services/culture-heritage/archives/exhibitions/youghal-bridge-a-brief-history/. Waterford Mail, 27 July 1839, published a brief statement of the accounts for 1838-9.

^[79] Waterford Standard, 17 May 1952.

^[80] Irish Independent, 2 June 1960; https://waterfordcouncil.ie/services/culture-heritage/archives/exhibitions/youghal-bridge-a-brief-history/.

^[81] In 1902, the future N25 from Waterford to Youghal was described as "one of the best long stretches of road in Ireland". The surface was "quite above average, and in very good condition, with very easy gradients", with the exception of two miles (3.2 kms) on either side of Dungarvan, "when it suddenly becomes a wretched, bumpy road, worse than usual". After climbing the Drum Hills, the road was "excellent – not quite so good as the first section – till within 5 miles [8 kms] of Youghal when it again became bumpy". H.R.G. Inglis, The 'Royal' Road Book of Ireland (Edinburgh, 1902), 52. One plausible inference here is that there was not much long-distance road traffic between Waterford and Youghal. The road from Cork to Youghal was described as bumpy as far as Glanmire (56).

^[82] Cadogan, ed., Lewis' Cork, 439; J. Fraser, A Hand Book for Travellers in Ireland ...  (3^rd ed., Dublin, 1849, cf. 1^st ed. 1838), 238; General Advertiser for Dublin, 19 August 1837; T. Carlyle, Reminiscences of my Irish Journey in 1849 (London, 1882), 112. Carlyle had not been unimpressed by the inability of the Youghal post office to sell him stamps. In 1837, a second, more local mail coach service ran between Waterford and Youghal, through Cappoquin, Lismore and Tallow, avoiding the new bridge.

^[83] [W.W.Barry], A Walking Tour round Ireland in 1865 (London, 1867), 296. Buck's Arms Inn at Killeagh was the meeting place for a local charity in 1838. This was perhaps the handsome heritage building that later became Tattan's. Southern Reporter, 13 December 1838.

^[84] Francis Guy's County and City of Cork Directory for the Years 1875-1876, 177. Nor were branch-line services very fast. Percy French's 1902 ballad immortalised the plea from guard to driver on the west Clare line: "Are ye right there, Michael, are ye right? / Do you think that we'll be there before the night?"                                                                

^[85] An early motoring guide to Ireland (1902) described the future N25 from Waterford to New Ross as "a well-engineered road, which on account of the traffic is exceedingly bumpy almost the whole way; when the railway is completed the surface will improve." Inglis, The 'Royal' Road Book of Ireland, 46.

^[86] Inglis, The 'Royal' Road Book of Ireland, 7. The word "bumpy" appears 57 times in the book.

^[87] Road contractors were required to supply sureties as guarantors that they had the resources to undertake the agreed work. In the Waterford barony of Decies Within Drum, which was responsible for the maintenance of part of the Dungarvan-to-Youghal road, "one person only proposed to execute nearly all the required works" advertised in 1835. He nominated his son, who lived at home, as "security for the due fulfilment of the contracts". In view of the lack of alternative offers, this unsatisfactory device had to be accepted. Waterford Mail, 30 June 1835.

^[88] Cork Examiner, 20 March 1843.

^[89] Cork Examiner, 3 June 1859; 11 January 1860.

^[90] Cork Examiner, 21 April 1908.

^[91] Cork Free Press, 23 September 1913. King Street (MacCurtain Street) was surfaced early in 1914: Cork Free Press, 20 March 1914.

^[92] Irish Times, 5 March 1914.

^[93] Cork Free Press, 18 August 1913; Evening Echo, 1 July 1914.

^[94] Waterford News, 28 November 1913; Munster Express, 28 February; Waterford Standard, 5 December 1914. There was a predictable dispute over who should meet the cost. The asphalt had been repaired once: Waterford Citizen, 1 July 1887.

^[95] Dublin Builder, 7 November 1913.

^[96] Irish Independent, 5 June 1926, 9 June 1928.

^[97] C.J. O'Sullivan, The Gasmakers … (Dublin, 1987), 159 (the comment dates from 1935).

^[98] T. Garvin, 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1996), 63-91, esp. 83.

^[99] T. Garvin, Preventing the Future… (Dublin, 2005 ed., cf. 1^st ed. 2004), 103-4.  I have reversed the order of McGilligan's points.

^[100] J. Coakley and M. Gallagher, eds, Politics in the Republic of Ireland (2^nd ed., Limerick, 1996, cf. 1^st ed. 1992), 256.

^[101] D. Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 (London, 2004), 499.

^[102] Garvin, Preventing the Future, 82-6, 102-4, 120)

^[103] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1952-12-10/6/ (Seanad debate, 10 December 1952).

^[104] Córas Iompair Éireann. Its initials dug deep into the Irish psyche. I recall a politicised student at UCC in the late '70s denouncing American foreign policy, singling out for censure the Central Intelligence Agency, which he referred to as the CIE. The initials were said to stand for Creeping in Erin, and its logo was nicknamed the Flying Snail.

^[105] The railway companies which it took over had developed subsidiary road freight delivery arms.

^[106] A delightfully dated RTE news clip from 1962 reviewed the fate of the project: https://www.rte.ie/archives/2017/0612/882026-the-busiest-road-in-ireland/.

^[107] The 'Eire' correspondent of the Belfast News-Letter, 25 January 1950, who thought the project was "unnecessary and undesirable…. The road to Bray is not one of the main industrial arteries…. It is not greatly used by overseas visitors … and is only overcrowded on summer evenings and on Sundays, when many motorists make no secret of the fact that they drive to Bray to enjoy the more lenient licensing restrictions there." There was already a short stretch of dual carriageway along the proposed route. Unfortunately, it was in the south Dublin district of Foxrock, a name that was a byword for the elite and the effete.

^[108] Tom Garvin's Preventing the Future argued that policy-makers took delight in the determined obstruction of change. 

^[109] J.J. Lee argued that Whitaker aimed to seize the initiative from the IDA and the potentially rival Department of industry and Commerce in order to preserve the traditional control of his own Department of Finance. Lee suggested that Whitaker was also keen to restrain Lemass from moronic target-setting, e.g. his 1957 promise to create 15,000 jobs a year, apparently without any idea of how this might be achieved. J.J. Lee, Ireland, 1912-1985 … (Cambridge, 1989), 341-59.

^[110] https://www.liebherr.com/en-ie/group/location/killarney-profile-3759769. Legend claims that the company intended to build at Mallow (again, not an obvious location) but its directors were ambushed by an enthusiastic group of Killarney businessmen. Irish Steel at Haulbowline closed in 2001.

^[111] J.F. McCarthy, ed., Planning Ireland's Future: the Legacy of T.K. Whitaker (Sandycove, 1990), 49 (essay by McCarthy).

^[112] Garvin's Preventing the Future, 141-3.  Garvin pointed out that the technological time lag was so vast that Ireland might have done better to skip the land-line phase and move straight to the kind of mobile phone system adopted in more advanced countries, e.g. Kenya.

^[113] The Facebook page of the Irish Railway Record Society has archive film of sugar beet trains from Youghal. The beet was delivered to the station by lorries, which eventually pointed to the use of road transport all the way.

^[114] Ireland's subsequent absorption into the EEC ('Common Market') has tended to obscure the importance of the 1965 Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement (AIFTA). Britain immediately abolished import duties on Irish goods and also guaranteed markets for butter and cattle; Ireland promised a 10 percent annual reduction on British goods over a 10-year period. Official thinking argued that if Ireland's new industries could successfully compete in the UK market, they could also flourish in the wider European market place. Thus the AIFTA became a stepping stone to EU membership. Thus J.J. Lee's suggestion that there was "a touch of desperation" about the deal may be misleading. The label 'Anglo-Irish' was poorly chosen: the phrase has negative connotations in Ireland, and its allusion to England ignored the 32-county implications of economic integration. Lee, Ireland, 1912-1985, 353, 404.

^[115] There are also RoPax ferries which carry passengers as well as heavy goods vehicles.

^[116] Dungarvan in 1874: "Its streets, morning and evening, rattle with the hoofs of the stage-coach horses. All its passenger traffic is by car; its goods' traffic by the old-fashioned cart. The expense, delay, and inconvenience that through such transit is very great." The Waterford Steamship Company planned to establish a coastal passenger service. Given the sinuous length of the Suir estuary, it is surprising that this could be a competitive alternative to road transport. Clonmel Chronicle, 15 July 1874.

^[117] T.W. Freeman, Pre-Famine Ireland… (Manchester, 1957), 115 (map). Bianconi's Waterford to Cork service operated through Clonmel, Cahir and Mitchelstown, the highway that Anderson had prioritised.

^[118] Irish Examiner, 23 August 2007.

^[119] Irish Independent, 21 March 2008. In 1999, about 40,000 vehicles used the Jack Lynch Tunnel every day. The figure rose to 63,000 in 2016 and is now above 70,000.

^[120] Unfortunately the political culture of Kerry resembles a Pacific islands Cargo Cult, and counter-claims were advanced on behalf of two other TDs from the Kingdom, both of whom were front-benchers in their parties and could thus be plausibly regarded as influential in policy-making. There was no doubt that Castleisland was plagued by traffic congestion, as was the case with other places on the N21 road from Tralee to Limerick, but these were unluckily located beyond the bounds of the Kerry constituency.

^[121] Echo Live, 7 August 2019 (https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-40146194.html). For another report: https://www.96fm.ie/news/96fm-news-and-sport/hope-that-relief-road-for-castlemartyr-will-soon-become-a-reality/. The terms 'relief road' and 'bypass' have been used indiscriminately over the years. A rough distinction might suggest that Carrigtohill, Midleton and Youghal have bypasses, but Dungarvan (with a single carriageway and a procession of roundabouts) has a relief road. The short cut around the western side of Midleton, opened in 2009, is a relief road.

^[122] The Minister for Transport in 2019 was Shane Ross, a TD for a Dublin constituency who was a member of a loose grouping of Independents within the coalition. Deputy Ross sought to reorganise the State's priorities in order to reopen the Stepaside garda station, a campaign that contributed nobly to the merriment of the nation.

^[123] https://www.facebook.com/PatBuckleyTD/posts/update-on-castlemartyr-and-killeagh-relief-roads-below-is-a-response-to-my-recen/2188785297929408/ (27 October 2021).

^[124] A quarter of a century separated the two most notable examples of constituency windfalls, the Gregory Deal for the regeneration of Dublin Central in 1982 and the more mysterious Healy-Rae pact for the benefit of Kerry in 2007. In February 1982, Tony Gregory won a seat in Dublin Central determined to advocate the needs of a disadvantaged community. A socialist, he had little in sympathy with the Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey (although both were republicans), but Gregory struck an agreement with him which channelled £100 million to the inner city (with some of the cash supporting a Dublin-wide programme of public housing). Gregory's commitment to the interests of his voters was widely respected, but questions arise about the relationship between his deal and the classic model of the reasoned allocation of resources. Had the pot suddenly become £100 million larger, or was it perhaps that money that might have been spent in other cities was diverted to a single constituency? More to the point, if central Dublin had such a strong case for massive investment (as it did), why had the conventional system failed to recognise its needs? In the event, Haughey's government was defeated a few months later, and the incoming Fine Gael-Labour coalition largely carried through the programme, so that a backstairs deal became a national priority.

^[125] E.g. Mary Linehan-Foley from Youghal.

^[126] The rise of Independents has been part of an increasing instability in the composition of Dála. No party has won a majority of Dáil seats since Fianna Fáil in 1977, the last occasion in which voters signed up to a clear and bold policy (the abolition of domestic rates). No party has attempted to govern without a coalition partner since the Fianna Fáil minority administration of 1987, which was forced into an equally inconclusive election after just two years.

^[127] https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/politics/arid-40715960.html; https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/fianna-fails-youngest-td-on-how-dispute-with-leadership-over-vital-cork-road-was-resolved/40929668.html (both 8 October 2021).

^[128] Perhaps the Knights of Saint Columbanus have a secret highways division that comes to the aid of beleaguered communities in the hours of darkness? Maybe the Commissioners of Irish Lights would feel justified in building a bypass around Castlemartyr to give them easier access to Ballycotton lighthouse? If correctly reported, it was a strange comment.

^[129] Deputy Ryan reacted angrily to a newspaper headline attributing to him the view that "You don't need to own a car to live in rural Ireland". In a 2019 article, he had written: "We don’t all need to own a car," arguing that a village of 300 people could manage with a 30-vehicle car pool. He also suggested that country people "could walk to a pick-up point or cycle". https://www.thejournal.ie/car-pooling-eamon-ryan-4847511-Oct2019/.  He was TD for Dublin South. At the 2024 general election, the Green Party lost 11 of its 12 Dáil seats. East Cork has very few villages.

^[130] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2025-03-04/104/ (4 March 2025). The latter claim was a slight exaggeration. In 2025, the daily average of vehicles passing between Barefield and Crusheen, the central section of the M18, was 17,516, but the traffic flows between Limerick and Ennis, and in the approaches to Galway City, were both much heavier. As noted, the 2025 daily average count of 16,180 on the N25 at Loughaderra considerably undercounts the number of vehicles passing through Castlemartyr since it does not register purely local traffic.

^[131] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2022-01-19/263/. Deputy Sherlock retired from the Dáil in 2024.

^[132] To avoid any risk of accidental distortion through omission, I give here the Minister's full reply: "As Minister for Transport, I have responsibility for overall policy and exchequer funding in relation to the National Roads Programme. Under the Roads Acts 1993-2015 and in line with the National Development Plan (NDP), the planning, design and construction of individual national roads is a matter for Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), in conjunction with the local authorities concerned. This is also subject to the Public Spending Code and the necessary statutory approvals. In this context, TII is best placed to advise you on regarding the N25 Midleton to Youghal project including the Castlemartyr bypass." https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2023-01-19/85/.

^[133] The reply is undated.

^[134] https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41076986.html.

^[135] "The N25 Midleton to Youghal scheme, which includes bypasses of the villages of Castlemartyr and Killeagh, was not listed in the NDP; however, an allocation of €100,000 was made available in 2022 to Cork County Council to allow for the development of a Strategic Assessment Report as then required by the Public Spending Code. That Strategic Assessment Report was submitted to my Department in January 2023 and a further allocation of €800,000 was provided by my Department in 2023 to ensure continued progression of the scheme this year. By the end of the year it is expected the scheme will have completed the next phase of its development through the finalisation of a feasibility report while Cork County Council are also seeking to have a new technical advisor in place by year end to assist with the scheme’s subsequent phases."

https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2023-10-05/24/.

^[136] https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41176816.html (July 2023). Mallow was part of the Cork East constituency until redistribution in 2024.

^[137] https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41156245.html (June 2023). The sense of frustration was hardly alleviated by the announcement, later that year, that the government planned to fast-track a bypass around Adare in County Limerick, where an international sporting event, the Ryder Cup, was scheduled for 2027. Minister Ryan announced that the project would result in "less congestion and noise, air quality will be better, it will be easier for people to get in and out of their own town, it will be much safer and there will be improvements to green areas and shared spaces, making it an even more attractive town to live and work in." These considerations evidently did not apply in east Cork. It was, of course, interesting to learn that a project could be fast-tracked. Watching golf tournaments is no doubt a popular pastime in Dublin 4. https://www.thejournal.ie/adare-bypass-eamon-ryan-6228225-Nov2023/.

^[138] Deputy Stanton was stonewalled in two further Dáil questions in 2024: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2024-02-01/37/; https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2024-06-20/87/.

^[139] The Dáil bike shed scandal followed an earlier episode in 2019, when it emerged that €808,000 had been spent on a giant printer, with Oireachtas officials not realising that it was too big to fit into its proposed location. The machine was placed in store, at a cost of €2,000 a month, while a further sum of €236,000 was spent on building work. One reported reason for the soaring cost of the bike shed was failure in the early stages of planning to notice a manhole on the site.

^[140] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/2024-10-09/3/. Deputy Stanton's reference to traffic reports presumably referred to local radio. Congestion at Castlemartyr is rarely mentioned on RTE Radio's AA Roadwatch bulletins.

^[141] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2025-01-22/148/.

^[142] https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/programme-for-government-securing-irelands-future.pdf (p. 77). TII's Chief Executive had warned in 2024 that major road projects were being delayed because money was allocated on an uncertain year-to-year basis. However Minister Ryan ruled out multi-annual funding.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41479846.html  (20 September 2024).

^[143] A van belonging to a company called Priority was passing in the background.

^[144] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2025-03-04/104/.

^[145] Irish Independent, 12 February 2026. As noted above, one specialist website was sceptical of the suggested start date: https://irishmotorwayinfo.com/inex/roads/m25/m25.html.

^[146] The understandable celebration of the event by elected representatives did not impress everyone. "Politicians just self promoting again this bypass should have been done years ago."

^[147] https://www.corkbeo.ie/news/local-news/the-bypasses-go-go-go-33914705.

^[148] B. Chubb, The Government and Politics of Ireland (3^rd ed., London, 1992, cf. 1^st ed. 1970), 204-5, where Garvin (1972) is also quoted.

^[149] Two academics (a political scientists and an anthropologist) have argued that the term 'clientelism' does not apply to Irish electoral politics, arguing that relatively few people seek favours direct from TDs (and the secret ballot means that there is no guarantee that they register their appreciation). I use the term here in reference to benefits conferred on communities, in Chubb's sense of 'bailiwicks'. M. Gallagher and L. Komito in J. Coakley and Gallagher, eds, Politics in the Republic of Ireland (2^nd ed., Limerick, 1996, cf. 1^st ed. 1992), 162-3.

^[150] I owe this story to the late Seán Daly of Tower Books, Cork. Joe Sherlock was succeeded as TD by his son Seán.

^[151] Population 2024, 111,458; electorate 83,545.In 2024, there was a 57.8 percent turnout, which set the quota at 9,602. Two of the four TDs were elected at the last count below the quota (which reduces as voters limit the allocation of their preferences), although both came close. To have a chance of winning a seat, a candidate needed to poll around 4,600 first preferences. This helps to explain the concentration on local issues.

^[152] No Independent has come close to securing election: Mary Linehan-Foley has run three times, securing around 3,800 to 3,900 votes on the first count in her last two outings, which indicates strong personal support in her home town of Youghal, but she has not attracted preferences from the rest of the constituency in the same numbers.

^[153] https://visual.cso.ie/?body=entity/ima/cop/2022.

^[154] The CSO uses both Carrigtohill and Carrigtwohill, a common overlap.

^[155] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2026-03-26/5/ (26 May 2026). Other predictions estimate Carrigtohill to reach 16,000 by the mid-2030s: https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41852607.html.

^[156] Clondulane, Glanworth and Kilworth.

^[157] The current TDs, elected in 2024, all show support for issues across the constituency, e.g. Fermoy-based Deputy Noel McCarthy's Facebook announcements show an interest in developments relating to Cobh and Mitchelstown, communities at opposite ends of Cork East, neither of which currently has a resident TD.

^[158] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2026-03-26/5/ (26 May 2026).

^[159] Castlemartyr and Mogeely were also affected by flooding. As noted above, flash floods destroyed the bridge at Mogeely in 1675, 1809 and 1839. There is a useful discussion of Midleton's flood problem on https://midletonwith1d.wordpress.com/category/flooding/.

^[160] Local representatives have pressed the case, e.g. Deputy Pat Buckley of Sinn Féin raised the issue in the Dáil in November 2025; Deputies Noel McCarthy of Fine Gael and James O'Connor of Fianna Fáil pressed the government for an update on plans to deal with Midleton's flood problem in February 2026. The core of the ministerial answer stated: "The Midleton Flood Relief Scheme is due to be submitted by Cork County Council to An Coimisiún Pleanála in Q3 2026 and be substantially complete by 2031". "We in Midleton right now are no better prepared for another flood than we were in October 2023," commented a local businesswoman. Monitoring reports of further heavy rain in November 2025, Deputy Buckley hopefully commented: "Fingers crossed so far so good in East Cork regarding major flooding." Not surprisingly, the slow official response has tapped into the subterranean suspicion that 'Dublin' does not care about their problems. "If only it was a bike shed we needed in East Cork instead of flood protection," observed one social media post. https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2025-11-04/532/; https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2026-02-12/32/; https://www.rte.ie/news/munster/2026/0207/1557173-midleton-flooding/.

^[161] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2023-07-12/70/.

^[162] https://www.echolive.ie/corkviews/arid-41541895.html.

^[163] https://archives.cie.ie/records/CIE/3/1/2525.

^[164] https://www.corkcoco.ie/en/resident/roads-and-transportation/projects-currently-ongoing. It is unhelpful that this website does not seem to be dated.

^[165] https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41740776.html; Cork Examiner, 17 December 2025.

^[166] https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41675582.html (24 July 2025); https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41854629.html (1 June 2026). This issue was raised in Dáil Éireann in February 2026, on behalf of Deputy Noel McCarthy. The exchange was a rare example of a backbencher cross-questioning a minister and pressing for answers. Deputy McCarthy was represented by Deputy John Paul Shea of Cork North-West, who had been well briefed:  https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2026-02-26/102//.

^[167] https://www.thejournal.ie/protest-whitegate-refinery-fuel-trucks-7009762-Apr2026/. Ballinacurra (the Midleton pronunciation, and used on local signage) also appears at Ballinacorra.

^[168] County Councillor Rory Cocking has suggested that a flyover should link the N25 (presumably from the west) with the Whitegate road. However, the County Council's director of highways assumes that a flyover "will mean a pedestrian footbridge will have to be torn down and replaced with an underpass": the bridge is over the N25 approach to the roundabout from the east. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41675582.html; https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41854629.html.

^[169] Its ponderous title, which is almost as long as the proposed road, is emblematic of the innate paralysis of transport planning. If it is ever built, the relief road will not be more than 5 kms in length. The 7,800-km Trans-Canada Highway manages with a shorter name.

^[170] https://www.corkcoco.ie/en/resident/roads-and-transportation/projects-currently-ongoing.

^[171] Irish Examiner, 19 December 2023.

^[172] It is not clear when this will be introduced, as some media releases seem to imply that the improvement in frequency will depend upon electrification: Irish Rail's May 2026 consultation document appears to envisage a service every fifteen minutes by 2030.: https://www.irishrail.ie/_kontent/d2e85689-fbf9-010a-a02e-587ed94b5032/e6bc15d7-df35-44d7-a3d3-384b3f9b71cb/Project_Report_PC2.pdf (p. 35).   

^[173] The same cumbersome url, pages 60 and 63.

^[174] "It is expected that this will in time become the main access to the site." The €2 million was to be inflation adjusted. It would be refunded if the work was not started within five years or completed within seven (which hardly suggests urgency) or if the Council "decided not to proceed with the proposed works", although even then incidental advance costs could be deducted. Irish Distillers would be paid interest until the bulldozers moved in. https://epawebapp.epa.ie/licences/lic_eDMS/090151b2808d6044.pdf.

^[175] https://www.corkcoco.ie/en/resident/roads-and-transportation/projects-currently-ongoing.

^[176] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2026-04-30/184/.

^[177] Irish Independent, 14 November 2009.

^[178] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2025-03-04/104/.

^[179] Irish Examiner, 13 January 2026: https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-41774117.html.

^[180] https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-40165005.html  (1 November 2018). Irish Rail was responsible for repairing defunct railway bridges if they were damaged by vehicles.

^[181] An example is an undated (?2024) media release by Cork County Council: "The Greenway is an important addition to the tourism infrastructure of County Cork and is expected to generate increased visitor numbers, providing a boost to the local economy. https://www.corkcoco.ie/en/resident/greenways/midleton-to-youghal-greenway." I have not traced any estimate of user numbers.

^[182] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/2026-02-25/3/. A doughty Youghal local historian has gone further. Mike Hackett compared the east Cork greenway unfavourably with the link between Waterford City and Dungarvan, where "you have high terrain with views of the sea, plus a long tunnel and even a high viaduct. The Midleton to Youghal greenway is between hedges and fields." He suggested that the only scenic attraction here is provided by the varied posteriors of cattle, although this was not the exact phrase that he used. https://www.echolive.ie/corkviews/arid-41656370.html.

^[183] https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-41774117.html.

^[184] Indeed, Deputy Quaide evidently grasps this point, since he welcomed the signing of the design contract for the N25 project and took the trouble to attend the signing ceremony.

^[185] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/2026-02-25/3/.

^[186] Irish Independent, 12 January 2026.

^[187] https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0524/1574920-navan-railine/. The Navan line will be 34 kms, 50% longer than Midleton to Youghal, and some land acquisition will be needed for new track.

^[188] The East Cork Rail Alliance in https://www.corkbeo.ie/news/local-news/new-push-cork-youghal-rail-33366473  (5 February 2026).

^[189] Irish Independent, 16 March 2026: https://www.independent.ie/county/cork/train-dream-in-cork-gets-rolling-down-the-line-as-restoration-plan-wins-support-of-city-council/a/141696810.html. Another councillor made the more moderate point: "it's not the silver bullet that some people feel that it might be, but it's a bullet we should be seeking to bring in".

^[190] https://visual.cso.ie/?body=entity/censusurbanprofiles.

^[191] 402 reported 45 to 60 minutes, 459 an hour to 90 minutes, while 89 took even longer.

^[192] Bus Éireann 260 to Cork starts from Youghal at 7 a.m. Although not an express service, it is non-stop from Castlemartyr to Tivoli and, in term-time, continues through the city to the two universities, UCC and MTU, being scheduled to reach the latter in 1 hour and 41 minutes. This is obviously a service provided for students. I do not know how well it is supported, nor how it is affected by delays at N25 pinchpoints.

^[193] There may be a few hundred additional car commuters from the district around Youghal. About 1,500 cars are counted driving east along the N25 between Killeagh and Youghal between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. each day. These evening figures are probably more indicative of commuter traffic than those from the morning rush hour which are complicated by school runs. The 2022 census figures would suggest that around 900 are drivers heading home to Youghal. However, since large numbers of cars travel the N25 at all hours, we cannot assume that the remaining 600 are also commuters. In any case, their destinations are not known, and hence the likelihood that they might switch to a train service cannot be deduced.

^[194] Car commuting is not necessarily the result of individual selfishness. Many people need to shift bulky or confidential material to work: teachers, for instance, do much of their marking at home, and it is not easy to handle a box of exercise books on crowded public transport. For families in which both parents have jobs, the car can be vital for school runs and emergency shopping.

^[195] https://www.irishrail.ie/en-ie/about-us/iarnrod-eireann-services/freight; https://www.irishrail.ie/en-ie/about-us/iarnrod-eireann-services/freight/bulk-freight-intermodal.

^[196] Fianna Fáil promised to shift thousands of bureaucrats out of Dublin during the 2002 election campaign. Their coalition partners, the sophisticated metropolitan Progressive Democrats, dismissed the pledges as "the worst kind of bogman politics". A brownfield site in the centre of Dungarvan earmarked for a government agency has since produced impressive crops of ragwort.

^[197] The Bus Éireann expressway route 40 operates up to thirteen daily return trips, the more leisurely 260 eight. A morning 260 service makes a detour to collect Ladysbridge passengers at 10.13 a.m., but (curiously) there is no return bus in the evening. Bus stop laybys in the village street are sometimes used for parking by idiot motorists, obstructing traffic when buses are forced to load in the carriageway.

^[198] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/2023-09-21/40/. Deputy Buckley also drew attention to an absurd anomaly. Dublin Coach offers a cheap fare on its non-stop service 600 between Dungarvan and Cork. Bus Éireann has matched this with a reduction, which made it cheaper to use service 40 from Dungarvan than from Youghal. "It is madness." (Youghal passengers are sometimes successful in demanding the Dungarvan rate.)

^[199] The use of Artificial Intelligence could improve the helpfulness of replies, since AI might accidentally release information that civil servants would prefer to withhold.

^[200] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2026-04-29/39/. "Ireland’s public transport system is at a pivotal point. Growing passenger demand, worsening urban congestion, and increasing reliance on public transport for commuting and essential travel highlight the need for reliable and sustainable services."

^[201] In 2023, Deputy Collins was Minister of State at the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. He had drawn the short straw and was on roster to respond to Deputy Buckley's comments on east Cork bus services. Minister Collins added: "The company encourages customers to book online for the best available fares and to guarantee a seat on their preferred service." The curse of online seat-booking is another burden on older people who are uncomfortable with the technology. It discourages the use of public transport for impulse travel. The 2022 census showed that one-fifth of the households in Youghal had no access to the Internet, which suggests that those who are most likely to rely on the bus are least able to secure a seat. 

^[202] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2026-03-24/333/.

^[203] https://www.finegael.ie/feasibility-study-needed-on-a-bus-rapid-transit-service-between-midleton-and-youghal-stanton/. In fact a guided busway would require signalling to police level crossings and to warn pedestrians.

^[204] https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41829371.html.

^[205] Irish Independent, 16 March 2026.

^[206] The Wikipedia article on the Cambridge Guided Busway is excellent, for instance, naming the contractor. 

^[207] The Wikipedia article is also informative here. There have been three fatal accidents, five derailments and several collisions. Speed has been an issue.

^[208] https://www.smartertransport.uk/has-the-guided-busway-been-a-success/ is a useful discussion of the CGB project.

^[209] It is worth noting that neither a busway nor a railway would result in major reductions in overall journey times between Youghal and Cork: the current Bus Éireann route 40 is scheduled to take 50 minutes. Given the unreliability of the service, this timetable may politely be described as aspirational but, here again, we should note that Cork's railway station is not conveniently located. The bus depot at Parnell Place is seven-to-ten minutes' walk closer to Patrick Street and the city centre. Campaigners are thus asking for large investments of public funds in projects that would provide more reliable connectivity but not necessarily faster travel time.

^[210] There is an explanatory memorandum of the legislation as proposed in April 2026 by the Oireachtas Library & Research Service at https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/libraryResearch/2026/2026-05-11_bill-digest-critical-infrastructure-bill-2026_en.pdf. The Dáil debate of 14 April covered much ground: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/2026-04-14/30/. Extensive criticism by An Taisce and Friends of the Earth Ireland suggests that the legislation will be contested in the courts. Several law firms issued commentaries during its passage: https://www.mhc.ie/latest/insights/review-of-the-critical-infrastructure-bill notes possible difficulties.

^[211] Critics noted that the words "includes, but is not limited to" in the list of possible projects.

^[212] Two days after this paragraph was written, it was reported that Minister Chambers was bringing to cabinet a "risk appetite statement". A Task Force had found that "delivery timelines for energy and transport projects have doubled over the past two decades …. a culture of risk aversion has emerged across the public sector ... excessive caution is contributing to project delay, higher costs and slower delivery of critical infrastructure, particularly in sectors such as water, transport and energy." Public bodies will be encouraged to purchase land for projects (e.g. bypasses) before formal approval of the projects, although this will require that funding is in place. As a first step, public bodies are to be instructed to "to prepare their own sectoral risk appetite statements", which sounds like more paperwork. https://www.thejournal.ie/civil-servants-take-more-risks-7093220-Jul2026/. In 1996, the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin forced politicians to face the blunt fact that Ireland was at the mercy of vicious criminal gangs. The best way to tackle the threat was to weaken the thugs by seizing unexplained wealth as the proceeds of crime. When civil servants outlined procedural objections, one minister angrily replied: "We are going to … do this and you are going to make it happen." (I omit one word of his pungent statement.) The Criminal Assets Bureau was established and the gangs were resisted. Determination to achieve results may be more productive than sectoral risk appetite statements.

^[213] Minister Chambers: "An administrative process will be put in place to facilitate those recommendations but I do not plan to commence this process until after the Oireachtas has approved this legislation."

^[214] Multi-annual funding for roads programmes was requested by Deputy James O'Connor in March 2025; Minister Darragh O'Brien agreed that it was desirable, but pleaded that "[i]t is not within my gift". In the April 2026 debate on the Critical Infrastructure legislation, it was mentioned by Deputy Conor Sheehan (Labour, Limerick), but not otherwise discussed.

^[215] https://www.fiscalcouncil.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/More-Revenue-and-More-Concentration-Ireland-Corporation-Tax-Paper-Brian-Cronin-2025.pdf. The two companies are believed to be Apple and Microsoft. 

^[216] https://businessplus.ie/news/government-borrowing-money-rainy-day-fund/.

^[217] "We know that we have had at least ten years of real problems where, due to the economic collapse, we simply did not have the resources to provide the infrastructure this country requires, but we have had the resources since 2016 and few efforts were made to address that deficit and the gap." Ged Nash TD (Labour) in the Dáil, 14 April 2026.

^[218] Two Independent TDs supporting the government are from the North-West.

^[219] https://www.securityireland.ie/publications/defence-at-a-glance-q2-2026, from which the following endnote quotations are taken. "Defence spending approximately 0.3% of GDP — the lowest in the EU against an EU average of 1.9% (2024) and estimated 2.1% (2025)." In 2026, under pressure from the President of the United States, European countries are increasing the proportion of GDP spent on defence. Most neutral countries spend above-average amounts on defence simply because they have no allies to turn to in a crisis. Finland, with the same population as Ireland, committed itself in 2021 to spending €10 billion on 64 jet fighters. (Finland subsequently joined NATO.) The last two combat-capable aircraft flown by the Irish Air Corps (they were mainly used as trainers and for aerobatic displays) were withdrawn in 1999. In 2015, a government report on air defence recommended the purchase of modern combat capable aircraft, but no action followed. In 2026, a spokesman for the Air Corps described it as "something that may happen in the next decade", pointing out that the acquisition of jet fighters would require "a new advanced training programme", possibly overseas. https://www.edrmagazine.eu/irish-air-corps-expansion-into-an-air-force. It should be stressed that descriptions of the capacity of the Air Corps in no way imply criticisms of its personnel. The 2026 strength of the Air Corps is believed to be about 700.

^[220] "Naval Service: 8 vessels, typically around four in operational rotation. Vessels not armed for combat. No fighter or air-intercept aircraft and no surface-to-air capability. Counter-drone delivery targeted September 2026." In December 2025, several military drones were spotted near Dublin as a plane approached carrying President Zelensky of Ukraine.  In June 2026, a French frigate equipped with anti-drone missiles was reported to be stationed in international waters off the east coast, to provide protection for EU leaders during the Irish Presidency. Of the Naval Service: "Vessels not armed for combat; no anti-submarine weapons capability; no standing subsea cable monitoring." Of the Air Corps: "No fighter or air-intercept aircraft and no surface-to-air capability; unknown aircraft in Irish airspace are intercepted by the RAF under an unpublished arrangement." Ireland's maritime zone, 880,000 square kilometres, is monitored by two unarmed aircraft, backed by ships from the Naval Service which cannot always send them to sea.

^[221] "Permanent Defence Force: 7,756 at end-2025, against an establishment of 9,739 – a shortfall of roughly 2,000." Lack of career opportunities and poor housing for families have caused serious problems in the retention of trained personnel.  A target of 11,500 by 2028 is regarded as challenging. 

^[222] Some defence expenditure can generate domestic prosperity but, at present, the State has no procurement agency to ensure efficient returns on its investment.

^[223] An instructive tale comes from the UK, which faces similar backlogs in tackling infrastructure and pressures on government spending. The roundabout at the junction of the A1 and A46 near Newark (227 kms from London) is notorious for congestion and tailbacks. Linking Leicester with the ports of Grimsby and Immingham on the Humber estuary, the A46 plays a role in the east Midlands economy similar to that of the N25 across the south of Ireland. (It also has a respectable pedigree, much of it having been built by the Romans.) An upgrade costing £297 million was approved in March 2026, with the UK Transport Minister saying that the project "will support sectors … which are dominant in the local economy and reliant on roads for growth, as well as improving access to Humber ports". Four months later, it was postponed (i.e. cancelled) to divert funds to increased defence expenditure. Daily Telegraph, 3 July 2026.

^[224] Irish Times, 9 July 2026.