William Dargan Bridge

As Bronagh has given a rather excellent history of the William Dargan Bridge (see below), I don’t see the need for any (hugely inferior) repetition from me. What I will say however is that this is a bridge that I truly like. If you are walking up to the bridge at night and a Luas is passing on it, it looks and sounds as if the Luas is also an alien craft floating along. If you are walking over the bridge, you get to see stunning dusks and good traffic jams too.
On another note, my dad and I saw it being completed when they inserted the final segment into the middle of it. Yes it was cold, yes it was the dead of night but dammit it was a very cool thing to see! Since that date I have walked over the bridge umpteen times enjoying concerts from Marley Park and wondering why I was crossing the bridge as I lived on the other side of the road.
All in all, its a great bridge!

Seeing as I seem to be on a roll with my facts of Dundrum (I should write a book!) I will now tell you about the Dundrum Luas Bridge. Did you know that it’s not the first bridge to span that particular stretch? There used to be another bridge there a long time ago that brought a railway from Harcourt street all the way to Wexford. The very clever Dublin council knocked it down in the sixties however thinking there would never be a need for a railway again! So wrong! So that how we ended up with the attractive bridge we have now. Do you know the name of this bridge? I decided not to name it its real name in the review title because then nobody would ever find it! Well it’s called the William Dargan, and why you ask? Well William Dargan is the father of Irish railways and he was actually the guy who built the first bridge to cross Dundrum, he also built the railway line that went over it to Dun Laoghaire. Really it’s only fitting that it is named after him!