End of the road

mccleanp

Our build is coming along nicely. Plasterers are working away and should be finished in a week or so. Plumber has started laying pipes for underfloor heating upstairs.

Just found out that our new house is right in the path of the new proposed A5 running from Aughnacloy to Derry. The latest road maps show our garage in the embankment, which leaves our house only a few metres away from the road.

If anyone has a good contact for a land agent familiar with this sort of problem, please PM me.

I am completely at a loss and would appreciate it anyone wanted to share any similar experiences or advice.

With the changes in planning law in NI, I suppose it is unlikely we will be building again. I have really appreciated all the advice and knowledge on this board and have learnt at lot from it. Thanks everyone.

bauderline

That's doesn't sound good !

I would start by talking to your architect about a good course of action and also attempting to contact the relevant section in the DoE in order to clarify the details of the road scheme and what phase it is at !

I have noticed a number of people that have badly caught out recently. There are two or three houses just before you get to Newry on the M1, the new section of the road being built appears to go straight through their front gardens within feet of their front doors...

Another one is the new off ramp for the N3/M3 on the Northbound section of the M50... It appears to be within 2 - 3 feet of the side wall of those houses...

IMO some piss poor planning....

P.

Poor Uncle Tom

You need to get hold of the planners report. I'd very much doubt that planning permission would be given for a garage to be constructed within an embankment without at least alerting you to the fact, if it wasn't shown on your site layout plan. All is not right here.

Graaaaa

That must be very worrying for you.

I can only comment on the Rep. Ireland process, but for a proposed road there should be more than one proposed route outlined.
Then an Environmental Impact Analysis is to be carried out by independent experts in various fields including social impact and noise etc.
This concludes with one particular route being advised to the local authority as the preferred route, after all the pros and cons are weighed up.

Generally there is still up to 25-50m 'wiggle room' for the final road alignment, and the earlier you find the right people and tell them you don't want to sell-up and move then the sooner your property will influence the road designers as they work out the curves etc.
If there's to be an embankment, this will make the land area to be taken wider and may not be such good news.

If all goes well and you end up with a motorway just behind your back garden, I would be sure to voice concerns over noise and get sound baffles included in the road designers details.

Best of luck

mccleanp

Some more back story...

We got our planning permission back in 2006, but didn't start building properly until early 2008. The road scheme was only announced in Oct 2008, so our planning permission was obviously not aware of the road.

We are quite a distance of the existing A5 (which is currently being realigned and a new roundabout added) and never imagined it could come our way. Four route options were published in early 2009, and it became clear that we may possibly be affected. The route options however still took in quite a large area, and we were on the edge. The preferred route was announced last week, however maps were only made available to the public (and landowners) this week. We had been in communication with the company responsible for planning the road through email, letter and phone, but no information was ever forthcoming.

As you can probably imagine, this has been an extremely distressing time for us. As if building a house wasn't stressful enough.

We have now appointed a land agent to represent us in our negotiations. Our first course of action is to attempt to get the road moved a few metres. Hopefully this will be successful and we will be able to save our garage and house. In the meantime we are going to finish the build since it is quite close and we have deposits paid for kitchen, bathrooms, etc.

Thanks for the support. I will update this thread as the story develops.

Graaaaa

I bet there's a county engineer or manager who has known for months, probably even before they went through a 'select from 4 routes' pantomine.

The more interesting question is whether your local councillors would have known, been involved, or had to vote their approval in a council meeting - possibly major road schemes goes over their level of authority. Unlike the poor characters in Kafka novels, we now have council minutes available for viewing and sometimes even published on the websites. Also there's that Freedom of Information thingy.

I don't know the best way to approach your local councillor, but I would think that getting him on board to campaign for your interests is better than finding out if he should take some of the blame. Forming a representative group with other affected landowners is also useful for applying pressure - if you have a local election on the horizon this is even better again. Unless it's a very tight fit they should be able to keep away, or at least keep the land-take to a minimum. Also I would check the EIS for a chapter on sound impact - you may want to create some noise now to ensure you won't be hearing too much in the future - a sound baffle (timber fence) on the motorway edge is becoming more commonplace as a part of road expense budgets, at least it was a year ago...