Queues of up to half an hour are becoming a familiar part of getting through Monaghan Town, according to Fianna Fáil councillor Raymond Aughey, who has branded the congestion a "huge problem" and put the lack of progress on relief roads and bypasses at the centre of the jam.
Speaking to Northern Sound after raising the issue at last week's monthly meeting of Monaghan County Council, Cllr Aughey, who sits on the Monaghan Municipal District, said motorists can regularly find themselves stuck for that long. He believes the slow pace of work on roads that would take traffic around the town is feeding straight into the snarl-ups on the streets.
Where the bottleneck bites
The worst pinch point, in his view, is the N54 Clones Road — a corridor that carries traffic both into Monaghan Town and on towards Belfast. Castleblayney and Carrickmacross already have full bypasses; Monaghan has a partial relief towards Emyvale, but on the Clones side bottlenecks still stack traffic back towards the retail park, Fine Gael councillor Alan Johnston told Northern Sound when he pressed the same case in January 2025.
Johnston then described congestion as "out of hand", warned of lost trade for shops and hospitality, and said a proper bypass needed to get onto the national development plan. Aughey's latest intervention shows the argument has not gone away.
Works on the N54 — but not a bypass
Some money is going into the Monaghan–Clones road, but it is for local improvement rather than a new route around the town. In March, Monaghan County Council unanimously approved about €1.5 million of works over roughly 533 metres of the N54, covering drainage, pavement strengthening, better pedestrian facilities and reconstruction of an embankment where subsidence and cracking had appeared. Senior Executive Planner Toirleach Gourley told the Anglo-Celt the scheme would strengthen the road and improve drainage; councillors noted conversations on the job had started as far back as 2018.
Useful as that is for the stretch being treated, it does not create the relief capacity Aughey is seeking. He is asking the Department of Transport at least to fund the design phase of the wider relief and bypass measures he says the town needs.
Safety worries in the same streets
Congestion is only one side of the picture. When the council launched Phase Two of its Road Safety Action Plan in September, Independent councillor Seamus Treanor said Monaghan Town itself has a problem, and called for a Garda speed trap near Beech Hill College to tackle what he called "unbelievable" speeds into the Old Cross Square area after 7pm. Sinn Féin councillor Sinéad Flynn highlighted a late-night crash on the N54 between Monaghan and Clones in which a vehicle left the road and smashed into a garden, destroying children's swings.
Cllr Aughey, who chairs the council's Strategic Policy Committee on Transport, proposed adoption of that plan and pointed to 45 road deaths in the county between 2016 and 2025, and 240 people seriously injured between 2015 and 2024.
What happens next
There is no public timetable yet for design funding on the relief roads Aughey wants. A full Clones-side bypass for Monaghan Town remains an aspiration rather than a funded project. For now, drivers on the N54 and through the town centre are left with the queues — and councillors say the pressure for a proper solution is only growing.
For more on roads in the county, see our stories on the Road Safety Action Plan and October road closures around Castleblayney.
