Meath County Council has repeatedly called for a bypass of the village of Slane - the latest call was made last month. Last week, in the absence of the bypass, the council agreed on a package of measures designed to improve the safety of traffic approaching Slane bridge.
Councillors have long been critical of the alternating one-way system across the bridge, particularly as it is a national route, the N2 between Dublin and the Monaghan Border with Northern Ireland.
At its January meeting council members expressed frustration that the bypass for Slane was not even on the National Roads Authority (NRA) roads programme. The council was particularly concerned that neither the N2 nor the N3 - the road from Dublin via Navan to the Border - was among roads to be upgraded to motorway or even dual carriageway status under the National Development Plan.
Yesterday a county council spokesman, Mr Brendan Stewart, commented that in the absence of the road being listed by the NRA, the most the council could do was to implement a package of road safety measures, including 1.4 km of traffic calming through the village and towards the bridge. Mr Stewart said that "gateway" signs and variable warning messages and a narrowed carriageway had been agreed by the council on Monday of last week, seven days before yesterday's crash at Slane.
The spokesman confirmed that the only major works currently contemplated in Meath on the N2 were in relation to a bypass for Ashbourne. On the N3 current plans were to bypass Dunshaughlin and Kells. Mr Michael Egan of the National Roads Authority said that it had never been part of Government thinking to upgrade the N2 and the N3 to dual-carriageway standards as part of the National Development Plan. "There were five key corridors mentioned in the plan, to the cities and towns of Belfast, Galway/Sligo, Limerick, Cork and Waterford. The N2 was never among them."
Mr Egan said that the current strategy of the roads authority was to divert heavy traffic from the north-west through the newly opened link road at Ardee, Co Louth, to the Dunleer bypass on the M1 Dublin-Belfast road.
It was, he said, Government policy to make the Dublin-Belfast road a motorway from Dublin all the way to Dundalk, with links to the N2 which would divide the traffic load, taking volumes away from villages such as Slane.
