Dublin stays slow

I watched last night's meeting of Dublin City Council on their streaming webcast where the 30km/h zone was up for debate again. On the table was an FG motion to scrap the zone. In response to this Cllrs Montague and Lacey put down an amendment that would have changed the area of the zone as outlined in a previous post.

To say that the councillors overall behaved like a bold 2nd or 3rd class in national school would not be understating it. Personal attacks, shouting each other down, repeating the point previously made, collectively they would have been kicked out of the Irish Times debating competition for lack of courtesy. To be fair to the Lord Mayor, she did her best to control the situation but at times, if I had been her, I would have called a halt to proceedings or started ejecting people from the chamber. I wonder if that is within her power at a meeting.

At the end of the day two votes were held. The first, to amend the motion to the Labour proposed compromise was passed but did not get the 66% support required. The second vote was on the original FG proposal and was heavily defeated 28 to 12. So the upshot is that the full 30km/h zone will be left as is. It will come up for review after 6 months of operation as was agreed when initially implemented but presumably any proposed changes will have to go to public consultation and then another vote of the City Council so is unlikely to come into effect in 2010.