02/11/2024
Response to Cllr Joe Boyle’s attacks on concerned citizens Newtownards Chronicle 31/10/24
It’s with some sadness (and frustration) that we once again have to defend ourselves against Cllr Joe Boyle who continues to set us up in opposition to the local Portaferry community as if we are not a part of it.
He is letting you know - again- it’s our fault that Portaferry does not have enough parking or toilets.
In last week’s Chronicle (31/10/24) Cllr Boyle states in relation to the botched 2021 car park debacle:
“Unfortunately ‘others’ [that’s us] were determined to prevent this scheme taking place and it was Portaferry as a community that lost out in the particular funding”. There are other disparaging attacks in the piece.
That was 2021. This is 2024 and he’s still scapegoating us. Nothing learned.
In 2021 we simply exercised our rights as concerned local citizens and rate payers to express concerns about the haste and the manner in which the Council intended to fell 13 mature trees to build a car park with no planning permission or adequate environmental screenings.
Despite our concerns being justified we continue to be mis-represented and harangued to fellow citizens by someone with civic responsibility who should frankly know better.
Cllr Boyle takes no responsibility for the mistakes and omissions made by the Council and leads the readers to believe it was all our fault. However had the Council gone about their proposal correctly in the first place - the way they expect the rate payers to do - our objections would have fallen on deaf ears. But they didn’t. They fell on the ears of the regulatory bodies observing the situation and the ears of the council’s own solicitors.
Ards and North Down Borough Council were left with no other option than to submit a planning application and comply with the mandatory environmental screenings which they should have done in the first place.
That application was submitted by the Council to their own planning department (up the corridor so to speak) on 6 December 2021 and they have been spending tens of thousands ever since - maybe hundreds of thousands of rate payers money to try make the scheme compliant.
Does Cllr Boyle also forget that campaigners agreed to a compromise design and the felling of some of the younger trees so we could still have the car park? We invested considerable efforts to reach that compromise. But guess what? His Council rejected the new rather attractive and compromise proposal. Instead they voted for the original option to fell all the trees. He was one of the 22 councillors who voted against the compromise design.
Now the design that Cllr Boyle voted for on 27 October 2021 - that was submitted with the Council’s 2021 planning application has been binned. Didn’t comply with all the great laws and protections we have in place to preserve the beauty and the nature that makes Portaferry and Strangford Lough so unique and special. Another new design has been worked up. More money.
Cllr Boyle suggests in his little article that 97% of people living in Portaferry were in support of the botched scheme. He of course gives no evidence of this. The 64,000 who signed our petition and the hundreds who have objected on the Council’s planning portal, not to mention the thousands of ratepayers from across the Borough who visit Portaferry every year - have no say.
But the sad thing for us is - that statistic is not about the facts. It’s a shot across the bow. We see it. We’re still here. And thankfully. So are the trees.
