Varadkar: No new roads without new tolls

THE Government must consider introducing new road tolls if it wants to build new roads, the Transport Minister said yesterday.

Leo Varadkar was speaking in Cork as he turned the sod on the €98 million N25 South Ring Road project — one of just five major road projects that will be built between now and 2015 after all funding was pulled from the state’s road-building programme.

But once work starts on these schemes — the N3 Belturbet bypass, the N5 Longford bypass, the N22 Tralee bypass, the N4 Downs grade separation and the N52 Carrickbridge to Dalystown — that will be it until 2015 at least.