Cllr. John Paul O’ Shea (Ind) today called on the Department of Transport to allocate special funding to repair our local & regional roads. The department is expected to announce funding for Non-National Road Grants in the coming days.
Cllr. O’ Shea submitted the following motion at today’s meeting of the Northern Division of Cork County Council.
“That this committee be furnished with a copy of the report presented to the Department of Transport in relation to the damaged cause to our national, regional and local road network in the division over the recent adverse weather”.
Since Christmas, roads across the county have been severely damaged as a result of the adverse weather conditions. Having travelled to view some of the affected roads, it is clear the road network in North Cork has experienced widespread damage and this has led to many people suffering severe hardship and disruption to their daily lives by having their local roads ripped up by the bad weather.
To respond to this emergency, Cork County Council provided its own funding of €1.6m for the Northern Division in order to deal with the immediate crisis such as pothole repairing, urgent drainage works etc. This programme of works commenced in mid January and is to be carried out over a six week period.
However, indications at this stage show that there will need to be significant road resurfacing works required as a result of this damage. A report recently presented to the Department of Transport on the recent damaged to our roads in North Cork are estimated to cost approx €6.8m.
The simply reality is that if no special allocation by the Department of Transport is made to cover the recent damage in the coming weeks, Cork County Council will have no other alternative but to review its the Restoration Improvement Programme.
This will seriously affect our roadworks & maintenance programmes for the year which will undoubtedly see more and more of our regional and local roads deteriorate even further in the coming months.
