Funding allocated to repair ‘atrocious’ roads

Roads in South Galway are in an “atrocious condition” according to a local Fianna Fáil councillor and while he welcomed the funding allocated by the Department of Transport for the county’s roads earlier this week, Councillor Gerry Finnerty felt it could have been approved sooner.
The department announced on Monday that the funding allocated to Galway County Council for road improvement and repair exceeded that of any other local authority.
It allocated nearly €179 million to road improvement and repair in the county for the year 2010.
“In all of South Galway the roads are in an atrocious condition. You are driving along and you can see where the roads are boiled up and on that boil you can see clay, muck, gravel, sand and stone,” Councillor Finnerty explained.
“In this day and age when you have NCT tests and car tax and people are having to pay for all that, they deserve roads in good condition. The amount of damage done to cars is enormous,” he continued.
According to Councillor Finnerty, the worst affected roads are in Beagh, part of the county that was badly flooded in November and December, Kilbeacanty, Peterswell, Derrybrien, Kinvara, Ardrahan and in Gort town itself.
“I attended a local area meeting on Monday and at it the councillors were told that there was €11m worth of damage done to roads in East Galway and there was just €2.8m to play around with to fix them. That showed the huge task the council was facing. It certainly was going to be a big fight to get roads prioritised in your own area because everyone was going to be looking for a chunk of that very small cake,” he said.
The Government allocation is “welcome”, the councillor stated.
“An investment like that is hugely welcome but as a Fianna Fáil councillor, I was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t coming a bit sooner. You could see the damage that was done and the bottom line was that we needed the funding,” he said.
Councillor Finnerty is optimistic that the money will be sufficient to cover the necessary work but he pointed out that assessments are ongoing and “when you go in to do work like that, you might find you have a lot more to do than you think. When the roads are being redone, we need to look at drainage. There has to be proper drainage off the roads so you don’t have surface water,” he stated.
Also, this week it was announced that work is set to begin later this year on the €500m Gort to Tuam motorway.
“When it opens it will be a good day for Gort. When this and the new Gort to Crusheen road is operational, hopefully we will see more people coming into the town. We would hope people from Galway and Ennis would start to come into Gort to do business,” Councillor Finnerty concluded.