Galway Bay fm newsroom – With the lifting of the 5 kilometre travel limit for the first time this year, traffic in Galway city has increased by almost 20%.

According to the Transport Infrastructure Ireland traffic counter, an extra 670 vehicle journeys were recorded on the N6 Bóthar na dTreabh on Monday morning compared to the same day last week.

According to the TII traffic counter 3,721 vehicles travelled along Bóthar na dTreabh between 7 and 10am on Monday.

That represents a weekly increase of 18%, while it’s also the first time that traffic has exceeded the numbers recorded before Level 5 restrictions were first re-introduced in late October.

Meanwhile, traffic in the city is also 164% higher than the same period in 2020 and just 8% lower than 2019 figures.

Nationally, there was a large increase in recorded traffic volumes on all major routes surveyed.

Journeys were up by 30% on the N40 in Cork, over 20% on Waterford’s M9 and 27% on the M7 in Limerick.

Galway Bay fm newsroom – Concerns are being raised over an alleged lack of planning enforcement across Galway.

The matter arose at this week’s meeting of the Athenry-Oranmore Municipal District, where Councillor Jim Cuddy noted there are only two officers to cover the entire county.

He said there is a lot of unauthorised development, and in many cases construction is finished before an officer arrives.

He gave an example of unauthorised work going on for over a month in his own local area, however an enforcement officer still hasn’t visited the site.

Speaking in response, Senior Engineer Damien Mitchell accepted the point but noted that there is a seven year window to take action on unauthorised developments.

Councillor Cuddy says there is very little enforcement happening across Galway due to a lack of staff...

Galway Bay fm newsroom – Work is underway to bring old dilapidated houses back into social housing use in the Tuam electoral area through a demolish and rebuild effort.

At this week’s meeting of the Tuam Municipal District, the Part 8 planning process was approved to demolish an old property at Knockaloura West in Brownsgrove and replace it with a new two-bed dwelling.

Another old dwelling at Woodfield, Dunmore is also now set to be demolished to be replaced by a new two-bed dwelling.

Housing Director of Services Liam Hanrahan told the meeting nine of such derelict sites have been identified around the county with six brought forward for development, including two in the Tuam electoral area.

The meeting heard that a number of properties which have been deemed as unsuitable for such development will be sold on with money from such parcels of land ringfenced for further housing development.