THE Taoiseach has been called on to urgently advance the construction of a new regional Garda headquarters in Macroom.
Cork North-West FF TD Aindrias Moynihan urged Leo Varadkar in the Dáil to expedite the construction of the new station in the town.
Planning permission for the headquarters in Macroom was granted in 2021.
‘A new policing model has been rolled out in many parts of the country and is now being rolled out in Cork county. A very obvious part of that policing model appears to be missing for Cork. While the headquarters has been identified in Macroom, and planning and the site ready for it, it is not being advanced. It needs to be prioritised and urgently advanced without delay,’ he said.
The Taoiseach said his officials were working on the matter and the project was ‘heading in the right direction’.
‘We need a new station in Macroom pretty urgently, and also in Clonmel and the Deputy (Moynihan) is correct to say that the difficulty is it has been rolled into a wider PPP project involving two garda stations, one in Macroom, one in Clonmel, and the Hammond Lane court complex in Dublin.’
The Taoiseach said that might have been a good idea at the time, ‘but it clearly hasn’t worked out. So I have officials working on decoupling that and that would allow us to proceed to construction, both in Macroom and Clonmel within months, and then Hammond Lane would be a standalone PPP and that might take a bit longer. That’s what we’re working on at the moment. It’s heading in the right
direction.’
