In Kilmore West, residents want Beaumont Hospital to do something about its staff parking everywhere

Dolores Kinsella says she’d just got home on 15 March when someone started banging on her front door.

“When I opened it, all they said was Mason, my 7-year-old grandson, was after being knocked down just outside our gate,” she says. “I nearly had a nervous breakdown.”

Locals to Kilmore West, where Kinsella lives, have been complaining for over a decade about their area being turned into, essentially an overflow car park for the nearby Beaumont Hospital.

Motorists double-park, mount footpaths, block driveways and dished areas of footpath every day, with no fear of consequence, Kinsella says. The situation has escalated in the last two or three years, she says.

Her grandson was trying to get across the road to the adjacent Castletimon Green, Kinsella says. There was a continuous row of parked cars along either side of the road, as there usually is, forcing what should be two lanes of traffic into one.

Her grandson could not see the oncoming traffic. A jeep was totally blocking his view of the road, Kinsella says.

When he stepped out, “he was knocked down, but thankfully the car was not moving very fast”, Kinsella says. “He got away with cuts and bruises. But I can’t tell you the fear I felt when I heard he had been hit.”

At a meeting on Monday of Dublin City Council’s North Central Area Committee, three councillors raised the issue in a motion of hospital staff parking on residential streets in the area.

“The parking and traffic situation in Kilmore West has become a health and safety issue for children and senior citizens,” said the motion from Social Democrats Councillor Jesslyn Henry, independent Councillor John Lyons and Sinn Féin Councillor  Edel Moran.

A spokesperson for Beaumont Hospital said Thursday that it was aware of the issue,  was “committed to being a good neighbour”, and  “has recently been in contact with the Chair of the Regional Health Forum – Dublin & Northeast for the purpose of planning a meeting as a priority and addressing this important issue”.

Possible improvements

Councillors for the area say they have been asking for years for a meeting with the board of Beaumont Hospital to address local concerns.

Lyons, the independent councillor, said at the local area meeting on Monday that he asked for such a meeting “naively” when he was first elected to the council in 2014.

“I automatically assumed it would happen and out of nowhere, nothing happens, ever,” Lyons said.

The Beaumont Hospital spokesperson said Thursday that it “plans to convene a regular engagement with the local councillors on matters of shared concern which will inform communication and development of mobility management and other hospital strategies”.

Lyons said the committee needs to sit down with the board and ask them how they are going to increase capacity for their staff to “park affordably” at the hospital, and not on the residential streets of Kilmore West.

The recruiting section of the hospital’s website says that among the things it can offer staff is “Car Parking (over 1000 spaces)”.

The multi-storey car park on hospital grounds costs €9 for the day for staff. The outdoor car spaces are free, but staff say they are all taken by 7.50am.

Social Democrats Councillor Paddy Monahan says that, while it won’t come close to solving the issue entirely, Beaumont Hospital should at least address the “low hanging fruit” and install proper cycling facilities, encouraging more staff bike use.

“They would have been bad in the 1970s, but now they’re 1970s and rusted and falling apart. Appalling facilities,” Monahan says. “I know they’re very lucrative car parks up there but put in some decent cycling facilities.”

The hospital applied in September for permission to install two new bike storage units on the hospital campus. “Each bike storage unit will be an enclosed, covered single-storey structure with racks to accommodate 56 no. bikes and additional, dedicated space for parking cargo bikes,” the application says.

There’s been no final decision on that application yet.

The hospital also got planning permission in November for the provision of a “Bus Connects Bus Terminus comprising 6 no. bus stops”, as well as “provision of 2-way cycle lane adjoining the internal access road between the Beaumont Road Junction and the Trim Road Junction”.

Beaumont also got permission on 8 April to build a new two-storey emergency department, a project that the application says will involve “net reduction of 172 no. [car parking spaces]”.

But it also has applied for a “single storey extension to the existing multi-storey car park”, which would “create an additional 146 no. parking bays, resulting in an overall total of 736 no. parking bays within the multi-storey car park”.

With construction work on-site developing the new A&E department, things are only going to get worse, says Fianna Fáil Councillor Racheal Batten. “They do need to address it, and there is space on campus to be able to do that,” she says.

Green Party Councillor Donna Cooney said Beaumont should survey its staff to better understand what modes of transport they use and what distances they are coming from, in order to look for solutions.

She also called for local representation on the hospital’s board. “There are big developments happening and they’re much to be welcomed in terms of more hospital beds and increased accident and emergency,” Cooney said.

“As a community, we need representation on that board coming into that development stage and I think that needs to be looked at again as to why we don’t have representation on that board,” she said.

Meanwhile

Henry, the Social Democrats councillor, said at Monday’s local area committee meeting that Mason Kinsella was in fact the second child to be knocked down in the area in recent times. “So that’s two now and it’s simply because they can’t be seen,” she said.

“Dished footpaths are being blocked so children and old people with disabilities and mobility issues are not able to get up and down the footpaths,” Henry said. “It’s just crazy at the moment.”

Cat Inglis, who lives and runs a business in the area, says a neighbour who had MS had to be wheeled on a stretcher to the corner of her road because the ambulance couldn’t fit up the road to park at the gate.

“It was clogged with cars from Beaumont Hospital,” she says. “My sister and me can even recite the reg plates of some of these cars, we see them so often.”

Disgruntled locals have set up a Facebook page called Kilmore West Is NOT a CAR PARK, documenting examples of cars parked unsafely and illegally.

“We’re held to ransom Monday to Friday, from early morning to night,” says Dolores Kinsella. “I tell people all the time, I live in a car park.”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.