Through traffic is to be removed from the diagonal at King’s Square in Mitchelstown allowing Cork County Council to, as Fermoy senior area engineer Brendan O’Gorman put it, ‘give the square back to the people’.

He told members at the monthly meeting of the Fermoy Electoral Area Committee on Tuesday about his plan to reinstate that part of the heritage area near Kingston College as a green area and put in a footpath. His plan is to then bring traffic back to the Pump junction. A big tree at the Pump junction is a problem that will need to be addressed, he said, as they would need to be able to allow two trucks to manoeuvre there.

“There’s a very strong appetite to do something there. It could be a focal point. We must try,” he emphasised. They could also consider not having  all of it as a green area but putting in a market area in part of it. He has €10,000 earmarked for the project but it won’t cover the full cost, he accepted. He assured members there would be a full public consultation period. He hopes to proceed with the work in the second or third quarter of this year.

Cllr Kevin O’Keeffe though warned him to ‘tread carefully’, saying it had been tried before and failed.

Cllr Frank O’Flynn commended Dairygold for taking trucks off the diagonal cutting through the square. They recently constructed a new access road to the plant from the Kildorrery road and are using that instead.