In Kinsealy, the long wait for safe walking and cycling routes continues

The tree canopies over Chapel Road in Kinsealy in north Dublin had littered the path with yellow leaves and debris from the week’s storms. 

Drizzle dampened the already wet and slippery asphalt.

The route that leads from Portmarnock into Kinsealy, which includes Chapel Road and Station Road, are narrow enough – two lanes for cars, sometimes with footpaths, sometimes not. Even when there is one, it is often too narrow for a buggy or wheelchair.

Sharon Finn, a local resident in the village, said both her son and her husband had almost been knocked down off bikes, cycling around the under 2 km route from Portmarnock Dart Station to Kinslealy.  

A van driver overtook her husband Martin super tight, she said. “Super tight and was reading and all that type of stuff, and nearly knocked him off the bike.” 

“It's too dangerous. Aggressive," she said.

The lack of safe routes to walk or cycle in and out of Kinsealy – which is north of Clongriffin, south of Malahide – is a major issue, said Green Party Councillor David Healy recently. 

It stems back more than a decade, he said. From when the area started to be built up with homes but the roadways weren’t adapted, says Healy.

“Over time, it’s become very difficult to walk and cycle on the roads around, but at the same time there’s been a big increase in the population,” he said.

The population is set to increase further still – with the Land Development Agency was granted permission earlier this year for 193 homes on the old Teagasc Research Centre to the south, and other developers were permitted 128 homes across two sites to the north and west of Kinsealy.

A spokesperson for Fingal County Council didn’t directly address a query as to why the active-travel links have progressed so slowly.

The Kinsealy walking and cycling scheme is now at preliminary design stage and the options report and preferred route drawings have been published, the spokesperson said.

The scheme aims “to provide a high-quality walking and cycling routes between Kinsealy and Portmarnock train station, and between Kinsealy and Malahide Castle and gardens”, the council’s plans say.

A long campaign

The lack of safe active travel options in Kinsealy is a major issue, said Healy, the Green Party councillor.

“People are within spitting distance of the Dart, but it’s not safe to walk or cycle there,” he said. 

Says Finn: “If my kids want to go to a friend’s in Portmarnock or get the train, we have to drive.”

There’s no bike path, she says. “We’re supposed to be putting fewer cars on the road. I have 15 solar panels on my roof, but I still need two cars.”

A 14-year-old cyclist was recently injured on Chapel Road, she says – the road that leads eastwards to Portmarnack, and a route she’s been warning the council about for years.

“It shouldn’t take a child getting hurt for something to happen,” she said.

Healy says he pushed for years for cycling and walking links to be added into council documents, and work their way into the pipeline of projects. 

He wants the widening of Station Road, segregated cycle lanes towards the Portmarnock DART station and towards the city, wider footpaths.

He helped push for the National Transport Authority to fund a feasibility study for the cycle routes to Kinsealy from Portmarnock, Balgriffin, and Holywell, he said. 

The response to the study, published in November 2018, was positive, says Healy. “Nobody opposed it. Even the landowners were in favour.”

The 2019 local area plan for Kinsealy, meanwhile, included a commitment to prioritise the greenway link from Kinsealy to Portmarnock.

Residents have told Healy that they aren’t happy with all the delays, he said, and he understands why.

Portmarnock resident Ciaran McGill said he’s also been pushing for this for a decade.

He broke his shoulder early one morning years ago, he said. "I was going around the corner, probably too fast, and the bike slipped from underneath me, you know." 

"Accidents on bicycles can happen so easily, like that, because you don't have the same grip that you would in a car or something with a bigger wheelbase," he said.

He said his wife almost got clipped too, a separate incident. He said it’s not fair that more houses got built and the infrastructure didn’t.

"You're forced to use your car around here at the moment, unfortunately, and every house has, you know, has a car or two cars, and the roads don't get any wider," says McGill.

Healy can’t quite say why it’s taken so long to get to the stage of preliminary design – but he has some suspicions. 

Too few staff, too many competing priorities — and a lack of institutional urgency around active travel, he said. “It’s collectively our fault as a council. We should have been working on this 10 years ago.”

“Our timescale was completely abandoned at some stage,” said Healy. 

From here

There were more than 150 submissions earlier this year to a consultation on the Kinsealy Walking and Cycling scheme, according to a council report. 

Most were in favour. 

The preferred route, the council report says, would run between Kinsealy and Portmarnock to the train station, in addition to a second route between Kinsealy and Malahide Castle and Gardens.

They write, the two routes are intended to form high-quality walking and cycling facilities from Kinsealy to sustainable transport (train services) at Portmarnock and Malahide.

Inside her kitchen, Finn scrolled through emails she’s sent to Fingal County Council. 

“The answers were not concrete,” she said. 

She still isn’t happy with the slow pace of progress, she says. She hasn’t seen an improvement to the safety issues, she organised residents to lobby for safer passage between her area and the dart station.

She wants answers from Fingal County Council.

“Why did you build 200 houses without a connecting pathway? How come that wasn't part of the original planning?” she says.  

“How long is it going to take in order to connect those paths? Do you have the budget in place to make it happen? So, simple questions,” says Finn.

Finn said, it’s obvious as a project manager – which is her day job – that the lack of a timeline is a problem.

“It’s an execution problem,” she says.

Residents finally got an update recently: the preliminary design and environmental screening will commence in Q4 of 2025.

But, Councillor Healy said he isn’t certain that timeline will stick either. “Apparently, it might be into the beginning of next year that we're gonna make that application,” he said.

For Finn, that’s not good enough. “How long will it take? Who’s responsible if it slips again?”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.