Touchy matter of bus-stop turf wars is not a new phenomenon unique to College Green

THE Áras in the Phoenix Park remains the place where most of our visiting dignitaries get hob-nobbed, but College Green is where Slanesized crowds turned out to cheer the Clintons in 1995 and the Obamas in 2011. Although it’s a mere stroll from Dublin’s city centre, there has always been an aloof distance between the President’s official residence and the plain people. College Green, on the other hand, has shown that it can be a public space in the truest sense.

And this week Dublin City Council voted to make the public even more welcome by green-lighting further traffic restrictions up to and including a total ban on buses and taxis. Needless to say, taxi drivers and Dublin Bus are up in arms.

We’ve been here before, of course.

The same objections we’re hearing now – it will close down stores, inconvenience the travelling public and put workers on the dole – were trotted out when Grafton Street, Henry Street and Earl Street were pedestrianised in the 1980s. Today Grafton Street sits pretty as one of Europe’s chic boulevards, while Henry Street is the hub of the country’s busiest shopping precinct.

Generational change has always been a feature of Irish public transport, and one that has always attracted shrill opposition from vested interests. If the Green Party ever has a say again, cyclists may some day find themselves the planners’ pet priority. Indeed, as far back as 1898 Dubliners were given a glimpse of how such a possible future might play out by ‘Irish Tourist’ magazine, which we’ll get to in a moment. Cycling was still very new to Ireland, and only 10 years earlier three cyclists had caused a panic in the Galway village of Spiddal as they approached at nightfall with their bicycle lamps shining. Fearing it was an attack of evil spirits, the locals screamed in terror. One cyclist wrote: “But as soon as we had passed, and they saw that we were real flesh and blood, and not a visitation of the Evil One, they ran alongside with shouts of delight and exclamations in Irish.”

John Dunlop gave cycling a shot in the arm when he invented the pneumatic tyre in 1888 to make Belfast’s cobblestones less boneshaking, and such was his invention’s impact that 10 years later ‘Irish Tourist’ ran a piece entitled ‘Dublin 50 Years Hence’, which imagined that the River Liffey from Capel Street to the Custom House would be pumped dry to create a long, broad, flat cycleway. Fifty years on the Liffey still flowed, but in public discourse Dublin was often dubbed “The City Of The Bicycles”.

Fast-forward to the 1950s and it was all change again. A powerful alliance of planners, politicians and bus interests had forced Dublin’s trams (the Luas of their day) off the road, while the growing car lobby was piling up newspaper scare stories about “The Bicycle Menace”, citing “defective brakes, lack of rear lights, cycling three abreast, swerving unexpectedly and taking chances in crowded traffic”.

BY the 1960s private cars and buses had won the day, and in a mirror of what’s happening with College Green today, turf wars ignited across Ireland over the touchy matter of bus stops. Ireland’s first bus stops were invisible to the naked eye. There were no poles to give them away, just the sight of people loitering at a particular spot on a roadside. When the first

poles went up, many shopkeepers and householders screamed blue murder, until the penny dropped that they boosted the resale value of houses and lured a captive market for sweets and cigarettes to shopkeepers’ doors.

In the early 1960s the State began relocating bus stops to safer places. Many existing poles had been plonked down where people had traditionally gathered, often on dangerous stretches. The papers reported that one potentially lethal stop in Dublin was at the very top of “a hump-back bridge”.

Seemingly not giving a hoot for the wellbeing of the travelling public, the nation’s shopkeepers fought tooth and nail to keep their captive custom. They fiercely lobbied their local authorities, who cravenly attempted to pass the buck to CIÉ, even though the transport company had no statuary power to designate and mark out bus stops. So CIÉ, FG’s Richie Ryan told the Dáil, passed “the entire blame for the transfer or removal of bus stops” to the Garda.

The travelling public came last in this blame game and to this very day there are bus stops dotted around Ireland in places where logic dictates they should never be.

As for College Green, Dublin city’s CEO Owen Keegan has made it plain the buck – and very likely the bus stops – will stop with him.

Generational change has always attracted shrill opposition from vested interests