Roads will get even worse if funding isn’t increased

OVER the past month or so, roads and water services all over Cork county have experienced widespread damage as a result of the appalling weather conditions.

This has led to many people suffering severe hardship and disruption to their daily lives – they were left without running water in their homes and their local roads were ripped up by the heavy rain, snow and ice.

In response to this crisis, an emergency repairs work programme fund of €6m has been put in place by Cork County Council to carry out emergency repairs to roads and water supplies in the county.

This programme involves repair of broken water mains, heavy patching, pothole repairs and drainage works on our regional and local road network. €l.6m of this fund will be available to the roads in north Cork. When you take into account that the north Cork division of the county council has six engineering areas – Mallow, Charleville, Millstreet, Newmarket, Fermoy and Mitchelstown – the €1.6m fund is now broken down into a measly €250,000 per engineering area.

This allocation is insufficient for the amount of damage done to roads and water supplies in north Cork over the past four weeks.

North Cork alone has 397km of regional roads and 3,014km of local roads and when you consider the cost of overlaying 1km of road is approximately €100,000, this allocation is nowhere near adequate to carry out any major works on the numerous roads that have been damaged across the region.

Cork County Council took its own initiative this week to put forward the €6m fund from its own resources to carry out essential repairs to roads and water supplies. To date, we have received no indication from either the National Roads Authority or the Department of Transport of additional funding to alleviate the hardship that many people in Cork are enduring and the difficulties they face with shortage of water and the conditions of our roads.

If additional funding is not received in the coming weeks, the county council will have no alternative but to review its overall road funding position for 2010.

This will seriously affect our roadworks and maintenance programmes for the year and this will undoubtedly see more and more roads deteriorate even further in the coming months.

Cllr John Paul O’ Shea

Laharn

Lombardstown

Mallow

Co Cork