Cork Views: The little bridge in Cobh that nobody seems to want to deal with 

I’m all for progress. I like to see my home town of Cobh moving forward, progressing, and changing with the times. Adapting to new opportunities, and creating employment for future generations.

It’s essential for community life, and if you can sense a ‘but’ coming, you’re spot on, because there is.

The people we rely on to plan our future and to lay the foundations to prepare us for what lies ahead don’t always get it right. Probably not as well as our ancestors did.

Take Belvelly Bridge, for example. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it’s the little bridge you cross just beyond the entrance to Fota Wildlife Park when you want to drive to Cobh.

It was built around 1803 and remains the only physical link between The Great Island and the mainland to this day.

It was a remarkable feat of engineering, when you consider they worked without the aid of computers or heavy lifting machinery, and it is testament to the skill of the workforce that it remains in working order.

But it was designed originally for the horse and cart, and now, like the roads connecting it on both sides, it’s no longer fit for purpose.

This has been pointed out to politicians for many years. It was obvious that the increased population in the town and its success as a tourist destination would lead to a huge growth in vehicular traffic, on and off the island. It was obvious too that the infrastructure would struggle to cope.

We should have prepared for that, but we didn’t, which is no great surprise, I suppose, but it’s annoying when you see how that lack of forward-thinking has come back to bite us in the rear end.

According to recent reports, plans for a major new port facility on the site of the former Irish Fertiliser Industries plant at Marino Point in Cork Harbour have been put on hold following a decision by An Bord Pleanála.

Goulding Chemicals had intended to relocate its existing fertiliser facility from Cork’s south docklands, where it has been based since 1955, to the Marino Point site.

But planning has been refused, and one of the reasons was the potential road safety hazard due to increased traffic, particularly around Belvelly Bridge.

That’s fair enough. The road infrastructure is already under serious pressure, without adding to it. The roads around Cobh were never designed for this amount of traffic, and in the summertime the volume swells even more with the addition of tourist traffic.

But this was being talked about when I was a young lad.

In 1974, the then Cork Examiner reported that the nitrogen factory at Marino Point, in Carrigaloe, Cobh, was expected to be in operation by the end of 1978, if decisions by the Minister for Local Government on their appeals against some of the conditions made by the planning authority were soon forthcoming.

The planning director of the company told of the Cobh and Harbour Chamber of Commerce at a reception at Marino House there would have to be a lot of preliminary work carried out in the interval, and agreed that the main road ing the area would have to be widened to facilitate the movement of traffic.

One opponent of those plans in the 1970s claimed the local road network in Cobh was already inadequate and would not have the capacity to cater for an increase in heavy goods vehicles that would be expected to use the new fertiliser facility. He was spot on, but that didn’t stop the development going ahead.

A few years later, in July 1983, the same paper reported that major traffic delays near Fota Wildlife Park could have serious consequences in the event of a major fire in the Cobh area.

Cllr Kevin Foster pointed out that since the opening of the park, traffic delays had been lengthy, and on one occasion it took a worker at Verolme Cork Dockyard three hours to get from Cobh junction to the dockyard.

“I would hate to think of the consequences if emergency vehicles were unable to get to a major disaster at some or other plant near Cobh,” he said.

As recently as 2021, The Echo reported that renewed calls for a major review of road access to Great Island and Cobh had been made by a Cork TD, Sinn Féin’s Pat Buckley. He had submitted questions to Eamon Ryan, the transport minister at the time, asking that the R624 be upgraded to a national route.

He also called for a widening of Belvelly Bridge, pointing to a number of road traffic accidents at the site.

In his response, Mr Ryan stated that the improvement and maintenance of regional and local roads “is the statutory responsibility of the relevant local authority”.He added that “the classification of the R624 is a ministerial responsibility under section 10 of the Roads Act, 1993. Roads classified as ‘national primary’ or ‘national secondary’ are funded by the State, and no decision has been taken to reclassify the R624 as a national road”.

That lack of vision is going to impact jobs and housing in Cork because planning permission was granted for 1,300 homes to be constructed on the Goulding site on the docklands once it moved to its new home at Marino Point.

But, with no permission, Gouldings must remain where it is, which means O’Callaghan Developers can’t proceed with their proposal for those new homes as long as Gouldings occupies the land.

So, at a time when there is a serious need for housing, those new dwellings are whistling in the wind because of a little bridge that no government seems to want to deal with.