Cullen denies favouring his constituency in €477m roads bonanza

ENVIRONMENT Minister Martin Cullen has rejected claims he favoured his own Waterford constituency and those of top ministers in sharing out the record €477 million funding for non-national roads announced yesterday.

Launching the programme, Mr Cullen said the fund was a 10% increase in the grant aid given to local authorities. This represents a record €4,610 for every kilometre of local and regional roads in every county.

"We are smoothing the way for road users with better surfaces, wider roads and enhanced drainage," Mr Cullen said.

But the Opposition claimed Mr Cullen was showing a bias towards Waterford city and county, giving them €21m almost twice the amount allocated to Dublin City alone.

Labour claimed the funding of eight top projects was influenced more by the presence of a minister than a road investment strategy.

Fine Gael claimed Mr Cullen had favoured Waterford because he wants to boosts the party's chances in the upcoming local elections there.

Waterford city got €10.6m while Galway City, which has a bigger population, got €1.8m.

"Minister Cullen certainly seems to be looking after his own constituency here," Fine Gael's Deputy Environment spokesman Padraic McCormack claimed.

Labour's Environment spokesman Eamon Gilmore said he could not understand why Waterford city and county got almost twice the allocation of Dublin city, which got €11.5m.

Mr Gilmore said eight of the top road projects that got funding under the €56.3 million strategic non-national roads scheme are all in constituencies that have high-profile ministers. "It seems that political strategy rather than road investment strategy guided these decisions," Mr Gilmore claimed.

While both Fine Gael and Labour welcomed the 10% increase in funding, they claimed a greater effort must be made to allocate it more equally.

Mr Cullen rejected the Opposition claims he was biased towards his home constituency.

"The South East has fallen behind the rest of the county in terms of infrastructure investment and the Minister is just playing catch-up and attempting to put this right," his spokesman said.

The non-national roads programme is an annual one and each scheme is judged on a project basis.

Individual local authorities decide how the grant allocation is spent, the minister's spokesman added.

Responding to claims that funding for eight of the projects was influenced by the presence of ministers in these regions, Mr Cullen's spokesman said: "Each of these projects is evaluated on a case by case basis every year."