A THIRD INSTANCE of a motorist having their window shattered by thrown rocks on a specific stretch of road in Co Meath has come to light.
The incidents all took place on the Clonee slip road off the main N3 Cavan-Dublin road over the course of the weekend.
And a local councillor has now said that the problem has been known about for several years.
26-year-old Orla Skehill was driving from Blanchardstown to Dunboyne with her brother yesterday evening when a rock was thrown through her rear passenger-side window.
“I was only on the slipway for a second maybe when a stone just came through the window,” she told TheJournal.ie.
I didn’t know what it was, I was just in shock, so I just drove a bit and then stopped. I didn’t know what else to do so I just drove home.
Thank God nobody was in the back seat.
Orla rang the gardaí and they came to her house in Dunboyne to examine the damage.
She says she won’t be driving the same route again.
“I used the road to drive home from work. But I’ll just drive straight from now on, I’m not driving that way again,” she said.
Orla’s story follows on from a pair of incidents on the same stretch of road that happened on Saturday evening.
One of the people affected, local woman Rachel Murphy who had been travelling with her daughter when the rock was thrown at her windscreen, also told her story to TheJournal.ie.
But according to local AAA-PBP councillor Tania Doyle, the issue is one that has been known about for some time.
“It’s been going on for years to be honest,” she said, adding that the behaviour is concentrated in an area of soccer fields at Littlepace in the village which backs onto the N3.
There’s containers which the kids use to store their equipment, and people are throwing rocks from the top of those containers.
It’s extremely dangerous, and to be honest it’s a blessing in disguise that nobody has been killed.
Doyle says that the teenagers in question “obviously don’t understand the gravity of what they’re doing”.
“There’s a lot of anti-social behaviour in the area to be honest,” she says.
On a couple of occasions the guards have gone up to check things out. But you’d need a 24-hour watch really.
Moving the containers will solve the problem in the near-term she says.
This is something that can be sorted, it just needs the gardaí, residents, and council to sit down and thrash it out.
“Gardaí at Blanchardstown are investigating one incident of stone-throwing which was originally reported to Dunboyne Garda Station yesterday,” a Garda spokesperson said when asked to comment on the issue.
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