The answer to flooded roads? Cut funding by €17m

MANY of our roads have been under water for months and there has been a rapid disintegration of county roads because of the weather.

Instead of increasing road funding the Government has slashed the Cork county funding by €17million.

While I am angry about the reduction in the allocation, there are many families in other parts of the country who are even angrier.

I know many families whose lives are seriously disrupted because roads are impassable.

People are unable to cycle on these roads, while hundreds of elderly people are afraid to venture on them for fear of falling, especially at night.

There has been a huge increase in recent years in the volume of traffic on secondary roads, many carrying loads greatly exceeding their limited structural capacity.

Very little of the regional and county roads system was designed or purpose-built.

Most of the road network has waterbound tarmacadam and broken stone or gravel bases over which a surface dressing has been provided to prevent water penetration.

The width on much of the network is inadequate to accommodate trucks coming in opposite directions with the result that they overrun the pavement causing severe damage.

Weather and ground conditions both affect roads.

Freezing and thawing cycles can break up perished or cracked surfaces and cause total foundation failure if reaching the subsoil beneath the road, as is happening at present.

Many rural roads have no satisfactory drainage system and water penetration through cracked surfaces which are not drained leads quickly to potholing and surface flooding.

The large reduction in essential maintenance operations, such as surface dressing and clearing of drainage outlets, as a result of cutbacks in local funding, has made all of these problems even worse and accelerated the decline in the condition of regional and county roads.

You don’t have to be a technical expert to appreciate the impact that neglect of the roads has on the lives of families with many isolated in their homes until storms abate and the resultant damage to roads and drains are patched up.

In the interest of road safety, the NRA should also attend to the mucked-up safety and directional signs on the very busy Cork/Mallow road, which have been so over a long period of time.

It is imperative that local authorities maintain their own commitment to investment in the maintenance and improvement of non-national roads and that state grants are provided to supplement the resources of local authorities – not to replace them.

Rural parts have been sadly forgotten in this regard.

Does the Government plan to treat the people of rural Ireland, where there are mostly third-class roads, as third-class citizens.

We need road funding and we need it now.

Cllr Noel Collins

‘St Judes’

Midleton

Co Cork