Monksland community meeting this Thursday to call for Lidl store's approval

A public meeting is due to take place in the Monksland area of Athlone this week as part of a local campaign calling on Roscommon County Council to grant planning approval for a Lidl supermarket in the area.

The meeting is set to take place at Monksland Community Centre tomorrow, Thursday, June 18, at 7pm.

It was called after a recent online petition entitled 'Demand planning approval for Lidl store in Monksland' attracted a total of 647 verified signatures on the change.org website.

Mark Francis set up the online petition and said the public meeting, which has been advertised on the Monksland Discussion Page on Facebook, was the next step in a campaign seeking the store's approval.

"The point of the meeting is to show that we as a community demand that the application by Lidl be granted this time," Mark stated.

Speaking to the Westmeath Independent last Thursday, he said he had contacted a number of elected representatives about the meeting and had by that stage received positive replies from two of the three Roscommon-Galway TDs, as well as from several local councillors and others, about their attendance at the meeting.

Mark acknowledged it was unusual to hold a public meeting in support of a planning application, saying this was something that had never happened in Monksland previously.

"Over the years the biggest ask that the people of Monksland have continuously looked for is an option to do the weekly shopping, because at the moment we have nothing other than a SuperValu store," he said.

"I know of countless people who are facing the annoyance of driving from Monksland to Roscommon, or to Ballinasloe (for grocery shopping).

"People have said. 'there's an Aldi and Lidl in Athlone'. Yes there is, but it's on the opposite side of Athlone, and if you hit Athlone at the wrong time of the day it could mean an hour's round trip."

A resident of Hillcrest, Mark has been based in Monksland since 1984, when the area was "nothing but open fields".

"It was literally just open fields. We had no street lighting, nothing. And I've watched it explode since 1984," he said.

"I was talking to a local councillor recently, who I won't name, who told me Monksland has basically turned into the dumping ground for all of the major housing development in county Roscommon," Mark said.

"The planning authorities, it seems to me, have no problem with throwing in housing estates everywhere, but we need the services and facilities to go with that, because Monksland has become the biggest townland area in the whole of county Roscommon.

"Monksland has other issues, which we will have to address in time, but for the time being this (Lidl store) is the one we want to try to get over the line."

On May 27, Lidl Ireland lodged a planning application with Roscommon County Council for the development of a single-storey discount supermarket and off licence, which would be located on a 1.2 hectare site next to the Joe Duffy car sales showroom, and across the road from the Athlone Springs Hotel.

The planning bid comes after a previous application for a Lidl store at the same site was turned down by the council in 2023, in a decision that was upheld by An Bord Pleanala the following year.

In the new planning application, Lidl Ireland states that the design and layout of the development, which also includes a small cafe/restaurant and another small retail unit, was "fundamentally" different from that submitted in the previous planning bid.

The discount supermarket chain said in its planning application that Monksland residents were currently travelling to the eastern side of the Shannon in Athlone to shop at "large retailers like Dunnes Stores, Tesco and the discounters Aldi and Lidl," adding that the Lidl store, if approved, would reduce the level of "unnecessarily long trips from west to the east of Athlone for food shopping".

Public submissions on the Lidl store plans are being accepted until June 30, and Roscommon County Council is due to make a decision on the planning application by July 21.