Elderly couple in Tullow going round the bend after car crashes into gardens wall again

KATHLEEN and Joe Maher’s garden wall on the Carlow Road outside Tullow was crashed into at 1am on Sunday 12 April. “This is the fourth time this has happened,” Kathleen said.

While having the garden wall demolished four times is a major inconvenience, what Kathleen and Joe are really worried about is someone dying the next time their wall is crashed into.

“Something really needs to be done or someone is going to get killed there,” Kathleen told The Nationalist.

Kathleen (75) and Joe (77) are not the only residents on their stretch of road to have had their garden wall crashed into multiple times.

“My neighbour has refused to rebuild his garden wall because it’s happened a few times to him as well. And to another house further up the road … they had their wall knocked down as well,” Kathleen said.

Eighteen months ago, the last time a car crashed into their garden wall, Kathleen and her husband went to Carlow Co Council and asked them to put in place safety measures to prevent such a crash from happening again. In response, the council put up a sign that reads ‘Slow Down’ outside their house.

However, Kathleen said that it has not made a difference to the speed at which people drive on that section of the Carlow road.

“They put up these signs, but that’s not what we asked for. We wanted a crash barrier.” Kathleen said: “If you listen to the traffic there sometimes, people driving on the road are not obeying the traffic signals at all. You get young kids in cars who think they are invincible and are going at speed. They don’t know that they are taking their lives in their hands.” 

The couple say that these incidents are incredibly stressful, especially when they occur in the middle of the night.

“This happened at one o’clock on Sunday morning, so in the middle of the night, you’re woken up. Then you have the police come to your door at that time of night and you get such a fright because we didn’t hear the accident,” Kathleen said.

In the past, gardaí have not been called to the scene by the person who has crashed into their wall and the person responsible has fled the scene. This has meant that the couple have had to pay to rebuild the wall themselves.

“It’s unbelievable that there’s nothing more done on the bend,” Kathleen said.

The crash took out a number of young trees that the couple had recently planted in their garden.

“We had trees and we can’t even find them. They’re gone,” Kathleen said.