Lough Key to Boyle Cycleway bollards damaged. Facebook image from 2022.
A hearing about a dispute over timber bollards on the Lough Key-to-Boyle cycleway came before Judge Éiteáin Cunningham at Carrick-on-Shannon District Court on Sept 16, where a council engineer alleged that Sean Carroll (51) of 3 Travers Hill, Boyle, Roscommon, told him the posts "would not remain," during a heated roadside exchange on 12 December 2019.
Engineer Adrian Kielty (now a senior engineer with Leitrim County Council; in 2019 a senior executive engineer with Roscommon County Council) told the court he met Mr Carroll on 12 December 2019 after customer service complaints about the freshly planted posts on the Lough Key-to-Boyle cycleway. He arrived to find a demonstration in progress: two jeeps with trailers lined up to prove, in Carroll's view, the approach had been strangled.
Kielty said he bluntly told Carrol the carriageway is about 5 metres, typical for a local/regional road, and the cycleway hadn't robbed width -- "we used the existing verge for the path." The bollards, he said, came from a Stage-2 Road Safety Audit to separate road and path at 3-metre centres over the 6km route.
What happened next, Kielty told the court, Carroll got "irate," stepped in close with clenched fists, called him a "thick midget" and "brain dead," and said the posts "would not remain." No physical contact, but a threat as Kielty heard it. There was no physical contact, he said.
Kielty said that in February 2020 he found sign-poles dislodged and thrown into a ditch after a contractor reported an angry approach by Mr Carroll; he moved the poles to avoid a repeat. On 22 March 2022, he said barrier signs were smashed and about 150 timber posts were "mown down" from Mr Carroll's entrance towards Lough Key, with an estimated repair cost of €9,700.
The defence pushed back hard. Carrol's solicitor Nessa O'Cullaghan argued the allegation is years old, "no official report of a threat was made to the Guards in 2019," she said. "The phrase would not remain" is ambiguous and could include lawful removal via proper channels. She cautioned against "prosecution by retrospect, memories can be coloured" by damage in 2022, for which no one has been charged.
Garda Colm Stenson said he attended the scene of damaged bollards on 22 March 2022 took a report from Mr Kielty after a media appeal produced no eyewitnesses. Garda Stenson read the statement from Mr Carroll calling the posts "a disgrace," saying he and another parked two jeeps side by side to show "it wouldn't work," and that dealing with the engineer "was like talking to a wall."
Judge Cunningham said she accepted Mr Kielty as a credible witness, was satisfied as to intention, and that the threat put him in fear it would be carried out. She stressed the decision is confined to the 2019 threat and the court drew no inference from later damage reports.
The State said Mr Carroll has seven previous convictions, most recently intoxication in a public place (offence May 2023, court March 2025), with abusive or insulting behaviour taken into consideration, and older road-traffic matters from 2002-2012.
In mitigation, O'Cullaghan said Carroll is a farmer with three children (two in college), also doing building/renovation work and offering ad-hoc local employment. He suffered concussion in a May 2023 road-traffic collision. She asked for leniency.