An additional £10 million will be spent on roads this year, the Minister for the Environment has announced. Half of the extra allocation will be for national secondary roads and the other half for non-national tertiary roads, Mr Dempsey said. The total grant allocation for non-national roads throughout the State amounts to just less than £178 million. The £5 million increase announced yesterday will be allocated to county councils for discretionary maintenance on local tertiary roads and must be spent on surface dressing, surface restoration and road reconstruction.
The Minister said the increase in expenditure on tertiary roads would "come as a relief to rural communities living along relatively isolated roads which would normally be low on the list of priorities for road maintenance".
The extra allocation was "an effort to off-set the disadvantages suffered by people in [rural] areas and to restore confidence in the Government's firm commitment to upgrade all regional and local roads needing attention in county council areas".
The other £5 million of the extra allocation will be spent on maintenance work on national secondary roads.
The increase will bring total expenditure on the improvement and maintenance of national roads to £255.4 million this year.
Mr Dempsey said the additional expenditure on secondary national roads would compensate for lack of investment over the years, which needed to be addressed urgently.
Supplementary Restoration Grants for Local Tertiary Roads
Carlow £75,000 Cavan £100,000 Clare £199,000 Cork £537,000 Donegal £293,000 D LaoghR'down £100,000 Fingal £75,000 Galway £352,000 Kerry £385,000 Kildare £100,000 Kilkenny £100,000 Laois £110,000 Leitrim £127,000 Limerick £126,000 Longford 100,000 Louth 50,000 Mayo 556,000 Meath 275,000 Monaghan 241,000 Offaly 109,000 Roscommon 173,000 Sligo 190,000 South Dublin 50,000 Tipperary N.R. 113,000 Tipperary S.R. 114,000 Waterford 75,000 Westmeath 100,000 Wexford 125,000 Wicklow 50,000
Total £5,000,000