Forty years ago today, driving in Ireland changed utterly

A Garda motorcyclist leads the first cars on the Naas By-Pass.

Motorists of a certain age — which includes myself — will have ‘monstrous’ memories of driving through Naas before four decades ago, writes Brian Byrne.

Of many traffic bottlenecks on the N7 road south from Dublin it was the first, and arguably the worst because both the Limerick/Cork traffic and the Kilkenny/Waterford stream both had to chug-chug their way through the Main Street of the town before dividing at Murtagh’s Corner and in each case heading for relatively less strangled roads at least for a while.

It was a situation no good for motorists going through, nor for the traders of Naas — those latter because, though they had previously objected to being by-passed on the assumption that they would lose business, nobody wanted to stop in the town while crawling through. The word ‘Naas’ had garnered a totally negative connotation among drivers that infected everything about the place.

That all changed 40 years ago today, when the Naas By-Pass was officially opened on 4 October 1983. As the Republic of Ireland’s first motorway section, the ribbon was cut by then Minister for the Environment Dick Spring TD. The 8km stretch, from Johnstown to Newhall, had cost £18 million, and was the forerunner of what is now some 900km of motorway-standard roads throughout Ireland.

Forty years ago there was still a long way to travel to the roads network we enjoy today, and to the later Newbridge By-Pass and the much later M9 Kilcullen By-Pass that similarly freed those communities from the crushing impact of through traffic. But we got there.

From my knowledge of the age profile of the Diary’s readers, many of you were either very young or not even born when that piece of ribbon was cut by Dick Spring. Apart from making the trip home to Kilcullen through Naas from my then employment in RTE a good deal easier, my other memory is that my Dad Jim Byrne, a founding member of the Naas-Kilcullen Lions Club, participated in a fundraising walk along the unopened motorway before the opening day, though in ill-health from the cancer that was subsequently to kill him. When I drive that original stretch of the M7 these days, I often think of him.

The event four decades ago today was also, as former Leinster Leader journalist and my longtime friend Liam Kenny recalls in this week’s edition of that newspaper, ‘the last nail in the coffin of Eamonn de Valera’s vision of a simple and frugal Ireland’. As a good journalist, Liam credits the comment to a 'foreign journalist’ who was present on the day.

Liam’s retrospective on the event and how it came about is well worth reading in the Leader this week. I thank him also for reminding me of a momentous anniversary. 

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