Looking back on the anniversary of opening of Naas bypass in 1983

Liam Kenny looks back to the opening of the Naas By-Pass forty years ago this month..

“Motorway opens up a new era” sang the front-page headline of this newspaper in the first week of October 1983 as it heralded the official opening of the Naas By-Pass, the first stretch of motorway standard road in the Republic of Ireland.

For decades previously the town of Naas had gained notoriety as a wretched bottle-neck for the increasing numbers of drivers heading to the capital from the south of Ireland. Queues and jams that might have been tolerable in the 1950s became monstrous by the late 1960s and it was clear that action would have to be taken.

However, in a country where the dynamics of local politics prioritised tarring rural roads over putting in place efficient inter-city routes, progress was slow.

And, indeed, it might have been just as well that the engineers did not rush to by-pass Kildare’s county town. One of the early proposals for a by-pass by filling in the disused canal branch. The waterway managed to escape being filled-in for a link road and survived to become a valued amenity for modern Naas.

And there were local commercial reservations which delayed progress towards relieving Naas of its burden of national traffic. In the 1960s Naas shopkeepers sent objections to the County Council on the basis that a by-pass would deprive them of lucrative passing trade. Ironically, a decade later, some of the same traders were pleading with the Council to deliver relief from the town’s congestion as the through traffic was overwhelming their local customers for road space.

When planning did begin in earnest for the motorway there was one further hurdle. Government floated the idea that the planned Naas By-Pass would become the Republic’s first tolled new build. Minister of State Ruairí Quinn, T. D. was despatched from the Customs House to sell the idea to a meeting of Kildare County Councillors in Naas. In an era before mobile phones there were intriguing scenes as the Minister shuttled to and back to a landline in the Councill offices attempting to win concessions from his Dublin mandarins in an ultimately futile effort to convince Kildare councillors to set a toll.

Construction of the motorway began in late 1980 along an eight-kilometre route from Johnstown to Newhall running between Naas and Sallins. There was little or no opposition to the project and care was paid to the concerns of landowners with accommodation bridges provided to facilitate those whose holdings were intersected by the bulldozed corridor.

And so, after three years of shifting Kildare soil, and having laid a surface as smooth as an airport runway, the day of the opening loomed. Most Naas people were too caught up in the happenings of daily life to register the momentous change that was taking place in the national status of their town. For more than eight centuries the old highways to Dublin from the Norman baronies of the south-east such as Kilkenny and Waterford, and, separately, from the old counties of the south such as in Limerick and Tipperary, converged at what was known in the day as “Murtagh’s Corner.” Such an ancient coming together was sometimes colourful on the day of an all-Ireland final when supporters from say Kilkenny in their black-and-amber draped cars met at Murtagh’s Corner with the stream of green-and-white decked vehicles from the Limerick direction – all heading for Croke Park.

Such scenes would be no more from the 4 th of October 1983 when a gathering of VIPs was present for the official opening of the road with the tape-cutting taking place at the Johnstown end.

The ribbon opening the eighteen-million-pounds road was cut by Mr Dick Spring, T.D., then Minister for the Environment flanked by Cllr Patsy Lawlor of Kill, Chair of Kildare County Council and by Cllr Pat O’Reilly, Chair of Naas Urban District Council.

The ‘Leinster Leader’ reflecting the momentous nature of the occasion covered the opening in detail with reporter John Lynch ensuring that all the key people involved were recorded for posterity. These included J G Ward, Co-Manager and J A Carrick, Co Engineer.

Particular mention was given to Kildare County Council’s road design team which had devised the motorway project in-house at a time when there was no national quango to take on such projects. The team was headed by Naas man, Dick Burke, Senior Design Engineer, backed by Oliver McCarthy, Chief Structural Engineer, and Peter Thorne, Chief Civil Engineer and heading an engineering staff which included Senior Resident

Engineers - Charlie Byrne, John Lahart, Gerry O’Brien, and Tom Tinsley. Their drawing office included Liam Carroll, Michael Dooley and Pat Cleary whose collective expertise was employed in later years by other counties progressing road developments.

Delivering on the ground to carve the corridor through the east Kildare countryside were Staff Overseers Michael Duignan, Paddy Egan, Christy Cullen, Vincent Keogh, Oliver Callaghan, Mattie Leonard, Tom Farrell and Bob Connor.

There were scores of others working for the contractors on excavating and building embankments. Their labours yielded the first stretch of motorway in the Republic of Ireland – a modest 8km which has now extended to some 900km of motorway corridor throughout Ireland.

The significance of the new road was not alone through relieving the long-suffering residents of Naas of the river of steel flowing through their town.

A foreign journalist who had been present at the official opening on that October day four decades ago filed his report which observed that “the last nail in the coffin of Eamon de Valera’s vision of a simple and frugal Ireland has been hammered in with the opening of the Republic of Ireland’s first motorway.”

So, the Naas by-pass became a cultural marker in the trajectory of late 20th century as well as being a much sought improvement to the national roads network.