M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning decision pending]

@marno21 any chance of a clean up on the last few hours of posts.

Do you honestly believe these two issues are even remotely comparable? That was a vote for a human right that should never have had to be put to a public vote in the first place. We never had to seek the public's permission for straight people to marry.

The will of the people is that everyone should be able to go about their business efficiently regardless of their means, insofar as is possible and where demand and trends justify this. The car is king in Galway due to public policy decisions that made it so. No city that prioritises car ownership over the ability of the masses to transit easily can seriously be considered as advocating for "the will of the people".

Galway in its current design and structure actively discriminates against those who cannot afford a car or cannot drive. No self-respecting city of scale can continue like this, unless you live in Dubai or Dallas, and I doubt they're good models for Galway to emulate.

I've stated time and again that things could be done now to stop traffic arriving into Galway in the first place, but you always ignore these simple solutions.

Nope, completely missing the point as per usual. There's no getting away from the fact that unless you reduce the number of cars arriving into Galway in the first instance, Galway will continue to have a traffic problem. The cars will still arrive into Galway from all directions. The bypass may/will merely distribute them.

Bus lanes should not be secondary to car lanes. Cars, be they electric or otherwise, are the least efficient form of transport in a city because they occupy the most space, yet carry the least number of people. Cars should make way for buses and other sustainable transport, not the other way around, because buses are available to everyone, regardless of whether one can afford a car or not, whether one has a license or not. We do urban transport arseways, prioritising the private car over everything else, whereas Europe (generally) does it the right way.

You think you have an indefinite mandate for sustaining the FFG merry-go-round of urban sprawl and car dependancy? Think again. Major change is coming down the line in Irish politics, as young people shun the county council approach to public policy that has run this country for 100 years. This change is occurring with or without the Greens in government; in fact, the Greens are irrelevant, because all parties, belatedly, recognise that sustaining the bad planning of the 60s-present is no longer sustainable. Unless you want to wish us all away by emigration, as happened here in the 50s and 80s, you better get used to this fact.

I know it must be hard to accept you're wrong on these issues because you've never lived anywhere else and sure this is the way things have always been done, but we've had it with amateurs enacting bad policy on a perennial basis. Enough with this crap. You either embrace the change or be left behind blathering in the corner. It'll happen with or without you.

Seriously, you need to drop this because it's getting weird. Any gay newcomer to a city judges the city's gay scene by 3 criteria: the numbers on Grindr and/or tinder, the number of blank profiles on grindr vs profiles with faces and finally, the number and extent of gay venues in a city.

I was at Pride 2 years ago in Galway. It was underwhelming and I'm entitled to my opinion. It was underwhelming because the numbers aren't there, as I have told you consistently. It's really not difficult to understand. There aren't many openly gay people living there and for those of us who are openly gay, Galway hasn't much to offer. That's my opinion, that's the opinion of the vast majority of gay people I know in this country, whether you like it or not. Ask the relevant people concerned because you don't know what you're talking about. Yes, there is an LGBTQ presence in Galway who have done great work over the past 30 years or so against many obstacles. That doesn't alter the fact that Galway is simply too small for most gay people to live the kind of lifestyle and meet the density of similar people that can only be found in a city of scale.

This is relevant to the discussion on the N6 because it feeds into a more fundamental argument about what Galway intends to do to not only sustain youth post college there, but attract people who have lived in bigger and more functional cities to move there. Expecting people to lower their expectations, buy a car, be content with a diminished gay scene if applicable and shrug the insanity that is the housing crisis and car dependancy of Galway is not going to attract these people to move there.

In conclusion, I don't really care what you think tbh. I'm not going to justify my experience of Galway's gay scene to a straight person who hasn't the first clue what it's actually like to be openly gay in the West, including Galway, and consistently dismisses my experience as irrelevant. Kindly do one and stop trying to override my experience, which is real and reflects the reality of life for LGBTQ people who continue to leave Galway and the wider region for bigger cities elsewhere. Your attempts to override my lived experience with your unwanted PR campaign to promote Galway is a really bad look and I'm not engaging with your gaslighting any further.

Attempting to make me question my sense of reality to the point where I don't believe it: that's gaslighting, albeit you're actually gaslighting the people in the forum rather than me because I think it is laughable, if more than breathtakingly brazen, for a straight person to tell a gay person who has experienced the Galway gay scene what's what about gay life in Galway.

You insist on telling a gay person that his experience of the Galway gay scene is wrong because you, a straight Galwayphile with an agenda to shut down anyone who deviates from your fixed view of Galway, says so, no matter how many times I tell you I know more about it than you do by the sheer default that I've lived it.

In your mind, your PR spiel is right because you're from Galway, you're definitely not biased and clearly have no problem accepting alternative view points and constructive honesty about those niche aspects of life in your city that you haven't a clue about. It's pathetic tbh.

Would you ever just piss off with your lies and misrepresentation of what I said. You brought up a bad-minded tangent by falsely making out my genuine frustration with public policy in Galway is caused by "the missus leaving him for someone better there". Of course that's just a classic symptom of somebody who A: has never encountered alternative viewpoints because he lives in an echo chamber, B: has an unhealthy attachement to a city to the point that his cognitive dissonance blinds him from embracing any constructive criticism of it and C: resorts to ad homimens because he has nothing better to say, thinking he's a hard man hiding behind his keyboard.

You haven't "caught me out" on any lies. Continue believing you have, since it's evidently so vital to your sense of self to believe things about Galway that anyone who's had an active experience of them, such as me, can counter. My experiences are real and valid. They're based on the reality of life before and after a week in June or a few random events in the Róisín Dubh. They're based on the demographic reality that Galway simply hasn't many openly gay or other queer people over say 23. You can blather to your heart's content with nonsense that because lots of people go to Pride, this somehow equates to actual LGBTQ people. Newsflash: many are straight and most are under 23. From roughly that age, most get bored with the limitations of what Galway has to offer and fundamentally, they get fed up looking at the same 100 or so faces who might range in age from early 20s to 40s, and they leave for bigger cities elsewhere.

I suggest, once again, that you actually engage with the community you're talking about within Galway because you're a straight man who has no clue about the lived reality past the optics of a few events. You wouldn't dare say what you're saying in public or to my face. Don't worry, your comments have been shared with those within the LGBTQ in Galway who can make their own statements about what life in Galway is like for those of us it relates to. You're not one of them. Or maybe you're one of those hiding under a blank profile, hiding from the wife, which anyone who's gay in Galway knows is a rampant phenomenon. Too close to the bone to say that too?

The gay scene in Galway could best be described as regional and small, with a heavy student presence, coordinated by strong local advocates making a real effort to be visible via events, but Galway doesn't have the population, scale or density to attract or retain young LGBTQ professionals. No straight man with a chip on his shoulder in defence of a city he doesn't live in is going to change that, much less change the demographic reality that most leave in their 20s never to return.

I'm leaving this forum to ye car addicts who have deluded yourselves into thinking a bypass that is already squandering millions of tax payers' money is going to solve your traffic problems. You can keep your average 40 hours per month sitting in a car, your traffic, bad planning and sad lack of self-awareness where it is within your bubble, while anyone with self-respect goes elsewhere, or takes action, against the odds, to stop the city being run into the ground by amateurs who belong in the bog rather than running a modern city.

Get up off your hole and speak to LGBTQ people and organisations in Galway rather than asking for 'stats'. Proof yet again that you haven't an iota of a clue about real life past the optics. You think these things can be quantified like hospital beds? You want a list of the numbers who have emigrated or moved to Dublin? You want to ask people in the census about their sexual orientation? Get a life and open your mouth with the relevant people, which I know you won't do. Visit Nova, Galway's sole dedicated LGBTQ venue, and conduct a headcount of the sexual orientation, age and life plans of those in attendance. I'm sure they'll be delighted to provide you with the data so you crave to sustain yourself.