A parish priest is leading a campaign for Carlow County Council to drop its plan for a major bypass of Carlow town.
Father John Fingleton is supported by residents' groups who say the favoured route would split the county in two and have a devastating effect on local communities. They also say they are not being properly consulted.
The council insists the only viable long-term solution to the town's growing traffic problem is an eastern by-pass on the N9 Dublin-Waterford road. "Traffic circulation in Carlow is already very constrained and the town will choke with this traffic if it is not moved elsewhere," said the county secretary, Mr Jim Kearney.
A final decision on the route. likely to be a dual carriageway, is not expected for at least a year. It is likely to take four years to complete the project at an estimated cost of £25 million.
Father Fingleton claims there is a cheaper remedy which could be implemented almost immediately and would avoid the social consequences of putting a new major road through the county.
He suggests extending the northern relief road which is to be officially opened by the Minister for the Environment and Local Government, Mr Dempsey, next Monday.
This route, including the new Bill Duggan Bridge, will enable traffic on the N80, which links Rosslare to the midlands, to bypass the town. A major benefit of the project is that traffic on the N9 and N80 will no longer converge on the town centre.
The new route begins at Sleaty Road and concludes with a roundabout on the Killeshin Road. Extending it by three miles to link it to the Kilkenny road at Mortarstown would give Carlow a new N9 by-pass, says Father Fingleton.
The proposal for an inner relief road was first mooted in the mid-1970s. But the council maintains it is not an alternative to a proper by-pass of the town.
"An inner relief road can only cater for traffic moving around the town," said Mr Kearney. "It takes traffic away from the town centre, but a by-pass is a totally different thing, catering for traffic which wants a clear route past the town."
Father Fingleton points to the success of the relief road at Kinnegad in Co Westmeath, albeit designed as a temporary measure, as an example of what can be achieved if the authorities look beyond motorways and major bypasses as an answer to traffic congestion.
He is supported in his view by Mr Joe Callinan, a native of Graiguecullen and former chairman of Lambeth Council in London who returned to live in Carlow two years ago. Mr Callinan dismissively refers to the road to be opened by Mr Dempsey next week as "the bridge to nowhere".
Carlow has no traffic management policy, he says, yet Father Fingleton "has come up with a very simple, commonsense solution to rotating traffic around the town" . The alternative is an expensive by-pass cutting through "the most beautiful rural part" of the second smallest county in Ireland.
Both men insist that in pursuing the by-pass option exclusively, the council and the National Roads Authority are sticking to a policy of "predict and provide"; in other words predict the level of traffic in the future and then build a road wide enough to cater for it, which has been discredited in Britain.
They are also ignoring the social consequences, such as those outlined in a consultants' report commissioned by the Bennekerry and Tinryland By-Pass Action Committee, a group representing two of the communities which will be directly affected if the route favoured by the council is chosen.
This option, known as Route 18, would begin in Co Kildare on the Castledermot-Carlow road and by-pass Carlow to the east before linking up with the N9 again just within the Carlow-Kilkenny border. Those opposed to the plan say almost the entire county of Carlow would be bisected.
Town planning consultants O'Neill & Associates of Howth, Co Dublin, who carried out the study for the Bennekerry and Tinryland group, "strongly advise" that the Route 18 option be reappraised. They say it would do "untold damage" to three designated nature reserves; affect the viability of a number of farm holdings; cause "serious community severance"; and cause noise, air pollution and safety problems for two schools.
While four other options are also being considered, all of them to the east of Carlow but closer to the town, Route 18 is certainly the front-runner. And objectors fear it is the only one under serious consideration.
Mr Kearney agreed there would be social consequences whatever route is chosen and said a full cost-benefit analysis would have to be carried out before any final decision was made. The negative impact on local communities, he added, must be weighed against the overall benefits to Carlow and the country in general.
While the council insists there is no alternative to the by-pass, Father Fingleton quotes Anthony Jay, creator of the Yes Minister television series: "The first rule of bureaucracy is: `The only feasible way of doing anything is the way it is being done' ".
