Laois Roads ‘Bottom of Pile’
Laois and Offaly at bottom of the Pile on TII Funding.
Local Sinn Féin TD Brian Stanley is Highlighting the fact that “Laois and Offaly are at the bottom of the pile of Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) grants for 2021. For full breakdown of what Laois will get click here.
Laois and Offaly have faired very poorly when it comes to the divvy out of road infrastructure funding for the current year with important projects in the 2 counties not even getting a look in.
While County Cork will receive over €87 million and Mayo €78.3 million, Laois has been allocated just €1.5 million, putting it at the smallest allocation in the 26 counties. Offaly didn’t do much better and is allocated just €1.8 million and ranks it in 25th place.
Despite the fact that Laois has important national routes traversing the county it has been left behind and means that badly need projects such as the Mountmellick Relief Road, the Portlaoise Northern Orbital Route and the Durrow N77 Bypass are been ignored by Government and TII.
Mountmellick in particular is in urgent need of the construction of the N80 bypass. This has been promised for years with no progress been made. Laois Co Council carried out a feasibility study on it last year and design works have been advanced, but without government funding it will not go anywhere.
In reply to a parliamentary question I put to the Transport Minister last autumn he informed me that Mountmellick was not even included in what he referred to as the Governments “strategic and financial framework for the National Roads Programme for the period 2018-2027”.
This is simply not acceptable and it completely ignores the fact that Mountmellick has serious traffic problems, in particular with trucks choking up the town centre. It also ignores the importance of the N80 in terms of it been one of the major national routes connecting the Midlands and the West to the Port of Rosslare. This is more significant now with Brexit as a lot of hauliers are now using this route to get goods to and from the Continent directly, instead of using Dublin Port and travelling through England.
Government must recognise that Strategic importance of the Midlands and start investing in some of these long awaited and badly need projects”