BY AMY ROSE HARTE

IN a period of immense change and development for the town, it's good to know that some things will always stay the same. Being terrified of the town traffic warden is certainly one of them.

Although it's hard to be terrified of the delectable Danny Dougherty, his role as Letterkenny's lean, mean parking ticket machine doesn't exactly make him one of the town's more cuddly characters. His mere presence usually sparks a mass exodus of shoppers and diners out onto the street, furiously checking that their Pay & Display hasn't expired.

This month, Danny is celebrating 21 years since he first began working as one of the town's traffic wardens. At 23 years of age, he answered an advert which appeared the Derry People and subsequently took on the role less travelled. He's now part of the furniture and the fabric of the town, and has observed first hand its metamorphosis from a modest market town to bustling urban centre.

"It was completely different back then," he remembers, "There used to be one hour parking in the town and I had to walk the street, writing down all the registration numbers of the cars and the times they were there. Then I had to walk back up the street, check them all again and put tickets on cars which were still there an hour later."

Fortunately for Danny, advances in technology led to the arrival of Pay and Display machines, just one of the many changes in the town which he grew up in and now aptly refers to as his "work station".

"There's less traffic on the Main Street nowadays. When people were going to Quinnsworth years ago, they would come up the Port Road, down the Main Street, round to Dunnes Stores and over the Pearse Road to Tesco. What they do now is that they go over the Railway Road, round by Argos, Lidl and then onto Tescos. It doesn't get as congested any more because traffic is more filtered now, people drive around a bit more and they don't stop as much," he said.

When Danny began working with the council in 1986, the Town Clerk at the time was Mr. Colin Morrow and three girls worked in the council office. Today there are 14 office staff. Danny remembers when the first building to be flattened on the Main Street was Houston House and urban regeneration took off in the town.

"The two people who I would give credit for the growth of the town would be Colin Morrow and the engineer Peadar McGrory because they would have been responsible for urban renewal taking off. A major addition to the town at the time was the Social Welfare offices on the Oliver Plunkett Road. People gave out that they built on a car park but at end of the day it was 350 jobs coming into the town in the early nineties," he says.

"I do think though that the council missed the boat when they could have bought the land behind the building on right hand side of the street behind Blake's Bar and neighbouring units. They could have used all those landlocked gardens to build a car park and had all the parking they needed. It would have been dear at the time but it would have been nothing to what it is now."

However, he's quick to dismiss suggestions that the Main Street is floundering at the helm of the big-brand stores which currently bookend it.

"It's not dying, it's just changing, and it's how people look at the situation," he says.

"I think that the Main Street this is going to become the old town area and it should be developed as such. Other towns have successful old town areas or so-called Latin quarters which are filled with cafes, bars and restaurants, so why can't we?"

Now living in Kilmacrennan, Danny, who is also an avid photographer, says he has every intention of keeping up the job for another 21 years.

"It's like any job, it how you deal with it and how you deal with the public. If you treat them with a bit of respect, you'll get respect," he says.