Sir, – Over the Easter Holiday, there were chaotic scenes in the Phoenix Park as thousands of families, hoping to visit Dublin Zoo, struggled to find parking.
The Dublin Zoo is a truly national Irish institution, with families travelling from Kerry, Belfast, Cork, Galway, etc, to see this beautiful and educational campus. However, over Easter many simply had to give up when they could not park their car, as the Dublin Zoo car park and nearby areas were completely oversubscribed.
The cause of this chaos was a deliberate decision by the Office of Public Works to end public parking along the main Chesterfield Avenue in order to create new cycling lanes on both side of this road, despite the fact that perfectly adequate cycling lanes, separate from the road, have for years existed a few yards away, through the grass. The only reason for this perverse decision was an ideological antagonism to those wishing to arrive by car.
It is simply wrong to ask families, especially those with young children and buggies, to arrive at Dublin Zoo either by foot or through the non-existent public transport system in the Phoenix Park. Many of these families have travelled huge distances to get to the Dublin Zoo.
It is yet another example of the “Green Agenda” losing touch with reality and inflicting needless discomfort on the local citizenry.
It is time for our local politicians, including Tánaiste Leo Varadkar, to put a stop to this new regime and allow parking again on Chesterfield Avenue. – Yours, etc,
Dr RAY BASSETT,
Dublin 15.