Stephen McNally 
John O’Dowd stepped off the train and onto the new York Street Station like a heavyweight boxer striding towards the ring. An entourage of personal assistants, journalists and photographers trailed in his wake as he made his way to the foyer to cut the ribbon on the new £17M station Train stations in Northern Ireland are as rare as… well… train stations. Few ministers have opened one in the last 60 years. If all goes to plan O’Dowd will open …
They’re about to jump start the Executive again. We may see a new face behind the wheel at the Department for Infrastructure with fresh ideas about how to get us out of our cars and back on our feet. It’s a good time to glance in the rear-view mirror and see what we can learn from the last comeback. After driving the peace process for almost 30 years, the SDLP found themselves stranded on the hard shoulder post Good Friday …
The draft for a Belfast Bicycle Network was launched in 2017 by the Department for Infrastructure. In 2022 the delivery plan finally arrived. It’s due for completion in 2031. The £100 million project is currently decades off schedule and nothing has been constructed. Copenhagenize Look up “the best cities in the world to live” and Copenhagen always features in the top 3. Search “the world’s best cycling cities” and it’s permanently embedded in first place. This isn’t a coincidence. Cycling …
In the run up to the local elections, John Manley’s Irish News article on Hill St. in Belfast added more fuel to an ongoing debate over car restrictions. But why does a tiny cobbled back street in Belfast warrant a quarter page in one of NI’s biggest daily newspapers and continue to generate a running commentary on other media outlets? Hill St. is located at the back of St Anne’s Cathedral in the old print district – and runs through …
Heading into the local elections in Northern Ireland, we’ll hear about health, the climate crisis, the housing crisis, anti-social behaviour, dereliction etc. We’ll hear very little about parking. But we should, because it affects all of us and contributes directly to those issues. The word “parking” has its roots in Washington DC. In 1871, the Washington Parking Commission was established – not to park cars as they didn’t exist then – but to to plant trees, bringing shade, birdsong and …
