In Lispopple, “we provide the bus service, but we don’t provide any stops”

The Kettles Country House Hotel in Lispopple north-west of Swords is a hub for those living in a winding rural stretch that leads from the Swords Castle in Fingal to Ashbourne in Meath.

“Half the town was here on a day, a few winters ago. I showed up too and was surprised to see everyone else,” says Ríona Butler, laughing as she takes off her jacket inside the hotel’s restaurant.

Outside, it is cold and windy and patches of ice spot the ditches along the thin road that runs beyond hedges past the hotel. A sign warns drivers of pedestrians. Cars, trucks, and tractors speed past.

The restaurant is busy on Friday afternoon with loud chatter and clinking cutlery and dark-wood furniture.

Butler, like many, is a regular. But even though she lives five minutes away, she had to drive her car to get here, she says, because it’s too dangerous to walk.

“The footpath ends right outside the hotel,” says Butler, “and I can’t get a bus to come.”

While the 197 bus, run by GoAhead, runs through here hourly, it only stops outside the hotel on the way from Swords, not on the way back – so not in the direction Butler would need to bring her to the hotel.

“The next stop on my side is three miles down the road,” she says.

There’s also the 41b, run by Dublin Bus, which travels this same stretch past the hotel on its way from Dublin city centre to Rolestown. It stops going both ways at Lispopple Cross, near the hotel.

But it only comes by a handful of times a day.

“You can’t put in a service and hold everybody to ransom, it’s like dangling a carrot in front of a donkey,” Butler said.

At the Balbriggan/Rush-Lusk/Swords Area Committee meeting on 11 January, Fianna Fáil Councillor Brigid Manton put forward a motion that the council should write to the National Transport Agency (NTA) and GoAhead to try to press the issue.

Said Manton at the meeting: “I’m proposing that the 197 bus stops at all of the stops outlined on the [41b] Dublin Bus schedule,” she said.

An official written response at the meeting to Manton’s motion noted that Go Ahead must get approval from the NTA to stop at the bus stops, so that routes and timetables can be updated. After that, GoAhead has to write to the council to review the plan and, if suitable, approve it, the response said.

Paul Graham, a senior executive engineer with Fingal County Council pointed to possible safety concerns though. Bus stops have to be a certain standard, he said.

Nobody would be in favour of putting in a bus stop where there aren’t footpaths, he said. “Because you’re leaving people in the middle of an area with no footpaths and a darkway and expecting them to find their way to wherever they want to go from that.”

“It might be the case that we have to wait until that road is upgraded with full infrastructure to do that properly,” he said.

A spokesperson for the NTA said by email that it is looking into the issue. Go Ahead has not responded to queries.

After a long wait

At the meeting, Manton said that residents waited ages for a bus service between Swords and Ashbourne. (The NTA contracted GoAhead to run the 197 route in November 2019.)

“We have been years and years and years waiting for it,” she said. “And now when it is provided, I don’t know where common sense prevails in these issues, but we provide the bus service, but we don’t provide any stops.”

Manton relayed the case of a carer who – because the 197 stops on one side of the road but not as much on the other – heads all the way to Ashbourne and takes the bus back. “To be dropped on the side of the road nearest to where she can contact her client.”

She says GoAhead, which manages the 197, should be urged to reach out to the NTA for a bus stop in the area.

At the Kettles hotel, Butler also pointed to the challenges for carers.

“My mam, she’s 90 years of age, and recently we have carers coming in. Some of them don’t have cars,” says Butler.

Butler sometimes drops her mother’s carer, Isabel Ncube, at the Swords Pavilions Shopping Centre.

Ncube, who has cared for Butler’s mother for around five months now, says she finds it hard to travel to their home.

“The last time I was there, I told people in my work that I waste a lot of time. So whenever they put me here they give me a bit of break,” she says. Still, it means Ncube loses hours in travel that she isn’t paid for.

“The 197 only comes once an hour, so if I’m even a bit late, I have to wait an hour, but I’ve never seen the 41b around,” she says. “I’ve heard it only comes a few times a day.”

It also means that when it’s raining or dark, they really have to roster someone who drives, she says.

Ian Carey, a Green Party councillor, said later on the phone that the issue of the 197 had been raised several times at council meetings in the last few years.

There need to be more stops all along the route, he said, at places like Fieldstown East and Fieldstown West too. “It passes through quite populated areas.”

The safety question

Most of the bus stops on the stretch are just poles on the side of a ditch. The buses generally just pause on the road, rather than drawing in anywhere.

Carey said that in the past he got a commitment that the council would put in a stop at Kettles.

An official said they needed to build a large platform where people could wait, he says. Later, he was told that it needed to go to planning – and he hasn’t managed to get an update since.

“There’s no urgency to this issue,” says Carey. It keeps coming around and around again with no progress, he says.

At the council meeting on 11 January, independent Councillor Dean Mulligan said the worst thing is that some people who get on the 41b have to follow a very dangerous bend in the road, with really fast traffic, walking along a ditch edge to a pathway that is 350 metres from Kettles.

“It’s an absolute death trap for cyclists, let alone people walking along the road,” he says.

In the bar inside the Kettles hotel on Friday, Colin Kettle, one of the hotel’s owners, is serving a customer his usual order, a pint of Guinness.

He is short-staffed so he multitasks with his brother to keep things ticking along. Hiring staff has been difficult because of a lack of accessible public transport, says Kettle.

“It’s frustrating. I was supposed to have three interviews for a critical night porter role this week, but only one could make it,” he said.

Some staff members who come need a pickup from the nearby bus stop. “It’s a twisty road, you can’t walk it. For some critical staff, we would provide them with a lift,” he says.

Kettle says the 197 used to stop at Lispopple Cross, a junction between R125 and Balcultry Road, where the 41b still stops.

But he thinks there was a near crash and it changed after that. “Somebody was knocked down,” Kettle said.

After that, the hotel offered their car park as a safe place for buses to draw in and pick up, he says. “We even proposed that the bus could come in here.” But that didn’t happen.

Mulligan, the independent councillor, said he thinks putting in a temporary bus stop for the 197 would be a first step.

“It might not be safe to put a bus stop there, but legally there’s a bus stop there,” he said on the phone, referring to the 41b bus stop.

His fear is that the motion earlier this month, rather than triggering a response that leads to more stops, may do the opposite.

It “could be that the 41b may stop stopping there. Because they may say that it’s not safe to stop there if they risk-assess the stop”, said Mulligan.