Councillors were united in their disgust at the state of the county’s roads during a debate on the 2016 roads budget at this week’s local authority meeting.
Councillor Dermot Connolly said it was not right that the roads budget had been reduced by more than half since a high of €38.9 million in 2008 to €18.5 million in 2016. The Ballinasloe representative told an anecdote about a young woman who had become stranded near his home recently, following a break-down due to her car hitting a pothole. He called aspects of the council’s road section ‘dysfunctional’ due to the lack of funding.
“We are not able to look after the citizens of our county as regards giving them a service on our roads, people are blue in the face travelling on bad roads. We need to send a message to the department that we need a fair slice of the cake. Whoever is responsible for these cuts has turned their back on providing a service on rural roads. We need more resources to provide a better quality of road service.” He proposed that a letter be written to the director-general of the Department of Transport seeking more funding and this was agreed with other councillors.
Fine Gael councillor for Connemara Eileen Mannion called the state of the N59 ‘deplorable’ while Sinn Féin’s Tom Healy said it is easier commute from Leitrim to Dublin than from Connemara to Galway city because the road is so bad. “I don’t see how this is acceptable in 2016. What is the context for our roads budget being reduced by so much? The roads are not getting better, neither is the weather, or the flooding. I don’t know what is going on in the minds of department officials to think it is acceptable to cut the roads maintenance budget. The situation is untenable and it has been that way for a long while now.”
Fellow Connemara representative Thomas O’Curraoin said it was a duty of each and every one of the 39 councillors to try and secure more money for the repair of the county’s roads. “Every year our allocation is dropping significantly. It will be going on until someone is badly hurt or killed in a crash due to the state of the roads.”
Independent councillor Jim Cuddy said the situation could not continue. “I couldn’t tell you the amount of people I have met recently who have wrecked their tyres. Enough is enough, people are out there paying property taxes, and motor tax, they’re not getting the services in return. We can’t have a situation where people are bursting tyres every day of the week. There is also a problem where jobs are being done, but they are not being done right because the money is not there to do a proper job, and you have potholes coming back within a few days. We can’t just close our eyes and say this does not exist because it does and it is a major problem.”
Councillor James Charity remarked that €40 million in road tax would be paid by motorists in the city and county this year and not a penny of that money would be spent on local roads.
Despite the concerns, the roads budget was passed with councillors agreeing that the roads unit had to work with what they had for now and there would be an ongoing campaign to secure more funding.
