In Naul, parents plead for better footpaths and slower traffic so their kids can walk to school

The occasional lorry barrelled down Naul Hill on Friday morning, rumbling past a few people strolling along the footpath next to a straight road connecting the local primary school and the heart of the village.

The hedgerows quivered.

Parents don’t feel safe letting their children walk to school along this route into Naul, says local Cynthia Kennedy. “A lot of trucks come through this area, a huge amount.”

There are no zebra crossings or blinking amber pedestrian lights. The footpath is patchy, switching to the other side of the road near a bend.

Towards the school, there are yellow rumble strips on the road. Every few hundred metres, a sign reminds motorists to be careful: “Thank you for slowing down,” one says.

But, at the top of Naul Hill, another sign says that the speed limit is 50kmph.

In an ideal village, the local kids could walk to the school but it is just too dangerous here, says Edel McMahon, the principal at Naul National School. “This has been an issue for decades.”

Locals have come together as Naul Road Safety to call for a safer walking route for kids and parents to the school.

The first ask is for the speed limit to be reduced to 30kph, McMahon says. “And the footpaths here need to be widened, because they’re just too narrow.”

It’s the kind of project that might be expected to fit neatly in the remit of the government’s Safer Routes to School Programme.

But that’s on hold for new applicants given the long list of approved projects still waiting to be built, said Green Party Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan in the Dáil in November last year.

He suggested that schools looking for works contact their local councils to see if they could glom onto other active travel projects that might be happening nearby.

A spokesperson for Fingal County Council did not respond when asked if it would carry out works in Naul to improve pedestrian safety, such as footpath widening, or lower the speeding limit.

Backing up

Kennedy, a co-founder of Naul Road Safety, has lived in Naul for more than two decades, she says.

She became an active campaigner in 2017 after her 13-year-old son was struck one evening by a van while cycling home, she says. “He’s lucky to be alive.”

Letting kids walk to school was never something that parents in the area actively entertained, she says, over a coffee in the Séamus Ennis Arts Centre on Main Street. “It’s always been a no-no.”

But then the number of pupils in the school grew and with that the morning congestion, she says.

“When my boys were going there, it would only have had about 100 students,” says Kennedy. It now has 161 pupils, says McMahon, the principal.

The morning set-down is a real concern, McMahon says. “We could have 50 cars coming in. Children are getting out and cars are coming around the corner with traffic backed up the hill.”

Naul Community Council, a voluntary community group, did a “health check” for the village in 2023, identifying key challenges.

They monitored the traffic that passed the school from 8.30am to 9.30am one Tuesday in June, and counted 88 cars, two vans and two lorries.

Between 4.30pm and 5.30pm that same day, they captured 88 cars, 27 vans and two lorries.

Braving it alone

Kennedy drives out of the village and past the school and turns a bend.

She spots a white-haired man in hi-vis strolling in the opposite direction, mostly along grassy banks. There’s no footpath on his side of the road.

He is one of the few people she knows who braves this stretch on foot, she says as she gives him a friendly nod.

“People feel insecure about walking here and so there’s a real feeling of isolation,” says Kennedy. “No matter where you go, you have to get into your car.”

The school is hardly half a kilometre behind her when she starts to point out several detached houses, with toys, trampolines and goalposts in front gardens.

“There’s children in there,” she says. “Children still going to the school.”

But even though the school is close, the kids still get driven in, she says. “Because sometimes the trucks come flying around the bend here.”

Naul Road Safety’s petition to Fingal County Council asks that the footpath on Naul Hill be widened to 1.8 metres and the speed limit cut to 30kph.

It also proposes that, longer-term, the school be moved to a safer location within the village.

McMahon, the principal, says relocation isn’t really feasible and could take decades. “You’re talking about rezoning and buying land.”

The school is oversubscribed right now, she says. “We have classes squashed into resource rooms.”

Waiting for the school to move elsewhere would be way too long and really the solution is far simpler, she says. “It’s about fixing up the road and the footpaths a little.”

Who would pay?

Between 2021 and 2022, 14 schools in Fingal received funding from the Department of Transport and National Transport Authority as part of the Safe Routes to School Programme.

Naul National School wasn’t put forward for funding, says McMahon. “I’m hoping we could be in the next phase.”

But it is still unclear when any future phases could be.

“Given the pipeline of projects due for completion, there are no plans for an additional call for schools to join the [Safe Routes to Schools] programme currently,” said Ryan, the Minister for Transport, in the Dáil in November.

Fine Gael local area representative Eoghan Dockrell says funding for Naul could instead come from the government’s active travel fund.

“The government has committed €360 million on active travel programmes nationwide annually, and these include improving walkways,” he said.

But just because money is there, doesn’t mean projects follow.

At a council meeting last October, David Storey, the council’s director of environment, climate action and active travel told councillors that Fingal County Council had spent just €13.1 million of its 2023 budget, less than half of the €28.5 million allocated.

The funds from the NTA were a challenge, Storey said. “The allocation for 2023 was €17 million and there’s ongoing challenges in the market getting consultants on board.”

They put a number of schemes out to tender but no consultants got back to them, Storey said.