Lights out on Athlone town bridge

Athlone's town bridge is currently cloaked in darkness, with all of its public lighting out of action.

The prolonged outage has led to concerns being expressed about the safety of pedestrians using the bridge outside of daylight hours.

It's not known exactly when the issue began, but it's believed the lights have not been working for well over a week.

The Westmeath Independent contacted the council about the outage. We were told that our query has been forwarded to the council's transportation section for a response. If we receive a response, we will publish it here.

In recent years council officials have spoken about plans to install new "state-of-the-art" lighting on the town bridge and Athlone Castle, but a date for when this will be in place is not yet known.

* UPDATE ON THURSDAY EVENING, JANUARY 20: Westmeath County Council said the lighting issue was now fixed.