Car parking charges in Westport to be suspended unless action taken at local car park

CAR parking charges in Westport will be suspended from Monday unless a programme of works is put in place at a car park where a business premises was badly damaged.

Cllr Peter Flynn has said local representatives will suspend car parking charges in the town unless maintenance works take place at Mill Street car park.

Staff at LS Hair Westport on Upper Mill Street were left ‘traumatised’ after a car hit a concrete block, which smashed into the glass front of their salon.

Eight people were on the premises at the time, but nobody was hurt during the incident.

Lynda McNally, owner and CEO of LS Hair Westport, said that the concrete lego block landed within ‘inches’ of a client during the incident.

Ms McNally said that she and her staff are ‘refusing’ to come back to work since the incident.

“We have 17 stations, but six of them are at the window…there was eight people in the salon at the time, if there was any other day there could have been 20 people in-house,” she said.

“The last time it happened, it took us five months of crying out to the council to get something in so finally they put in some concrete lego blocks, which shouldn’t have taken five months to put in.

“I can’t believe we’ve fallen on deaf ears with the town council. We’ve expressed that we don’t feel safe in the building, there’s a hill leading down into the front of our salon. Now they would lose ten car parking spaces there but the car park can continue to operate and generate €84,000 a year without that hill in use, but they are refusing.”

Emergency services attended the scene following the incident and a large section of the car park was closed off. The car park has since reopened.

“We were lucky in some ways that nobody was badly injured, or at worse killed. Thirteen people are out of jobs today because of the situation,” Cllr Peter Flynn said on Midwest Radio this afternoon (Friday).

The Fine Gael councillor demanded a programme of works that will address long-standing issues with the council-operated Mill Street and James Street Car parks.

Local representatives have lamented the state of the local authority car parks on several occasions. Councillors were told that funding had been allocated for so-called ‘essential maintenance’ work on Mill Street car park.

The matter will be discussed at this Monday’s meeting of Westport-Belmullet Municipal District Council.

“If we don’t have a programme or works both for that [Mill Street] car park and the James Street car park by the close of business on Monday we will be suspending all car parking [charges] across Westport,” said Cllr Flynn.

“It’s not something we want to do, but we cannot tolerate this any longer…I met with Linda [McNally] and her staff yesterday. They were traumatized. This is the third time that we’ve had an incident with cars going into a premises at the back of Mill Street. It simply isn’t acceptable.”

Cllr Flynn called for the car parking spaces on the hill at the end of the car park to be closed and for bollards to be erected to prevent a similar incident from occurring.

“We need to move in terms of putting in a programme to completely resurface the car parks, put in line markings, sort out the flooding issues on the James Street car park, sort out the entrance and exit at the James Street car park and Mill Street car park, and ensure that we don’t have a repeat of what happened yesterday and move forward,” he added.