A bridge too far...

We love our town. And we’re being forced into going through a very expensive

Bray is a seaside town surrounded by Wicklow’s granite mountains, with the River Dargle running through its heart. Our local council have decided we need another bridge to ease our suffocating traffic congestion – but it’s the wrong design, answering the wrong question, in the wrong place. • Swans rest and relax at Bray Harbour Swan Sanctuary. Swans can’t see straight ahead; the bridge design means it is only a matter of time before fatal collisions occur when they fly downriver. We know this from witnessing swan deaths and serious injuries at the Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin, where volunteers are left to pick up their beautiful broken bodies. • Intended for public transport, pedestrian and cyclists only, the bridge will be built close to the harbour. But it’s cars that need to be diverted from our town centre, not the buses! And pedestrians and cyclists will be moved from a perfectly safe route to the harbour, under the railway, to cross a bridge whose own Road Safety Audit was damning as it highlighted how dangerous many aspects of the design were for them. (Link Below) • To access the bridge in this location, a high, wide embankment is proposed to cross a floodplain which has served as an escape route for flooding in hundreds of homes upstream in Little Bray since people first moved there. This access road will reduce the size of a floodplain already constricted by a flood defence wall that defends the floodplain against flooding! • …And the proposed ‘landing pad’ for the bridge, on the other side of the river, is a narrow road between a small housing estate and a railway underpass to the seafront, set at an angle to approaching traffic… 

Yet Wicklow County Council decided that this proposal did not need an Environmental Impact Assessment – and, incredibly, our Planning Board agreed with them. We successfully challenged this decision in the High Court through a Judicial Review, and won. Thanks to you, An Bord Pleanala now have to reinvestigate the need for an EIA.

But, meanwhile, incredibly, the same Planning Board have attached a Condition to a recent grant of permission to the private developers who own this land that they should provide "precise details" of how they plan to 'tie-in' their planned private development with Wicklow's proposed, contested, and unauthorised bridge and access road!

We have been forced into another costly Judicial Review of this decision. We need to raise our previous target to €15,000 (including what we have already raised here) to make this possible. And we need your help - again - to do it. Please help us once more by donating what you can - and by sharing this page. Thank you so much. Further info at www.savebray.ie

Ireland AM Feature 

Flight Path https://youtu.be/WaDVXK00kxQ

Road Safety Audit https://www.wicklow.ie/Portals/0/adam/Documents/0dhBRy7-7kKinU82VPYiDg/Link/App%20I%20-%20Road%20Safety%20Audit.pdf