Council ‘under orders’ from IMF on road funding

Council ‘under orders’ from IMF on Mayo road funding


Anton McNulty

County Councillors will have to allocate roads for funding within the next fortnight or risk the possibility of losing funding because of new guidelines set down following the arrival of the IMF.
Joe Beirne, Director of Sevices with Mayo County Council explained that the process of allocating funding has changed on previous years. He said the Council were ‘under orders’ to do things differently and would be no longer guaranteed to get funding unless the road allocation programme is in place in time. He said this was in order to keep spending in check.
“The IMF have not gone away,” he told councillors at last week’s meeting of the Belmullet Electoral Area Committee. “This year all grants to be spent by us must be given to the Department of Transport, who give it to the Department of Finance who give it to the IMF. Road funding is not immune to it and we need to get roads in the programme. We have to keep on top of it and allocate our roads as soon as possible.”
Earlier the committee were told that there had been a substantial increase of funding for National Secondary Roads in the region with the N59 between Mulranny and Westport receiving funding for improvements.
Mr Beirne explained that this scheme was called the low volume scheme with construction on the Newport to Westport side to begin in the Autumn and would complement the new Greenway.
The route between the Newport and Mulranny includes a new route option away from the existing road to take some of the bends out of the road. Cllr Michael Holmes said this is up to a half a mile away from the existing road and goes behind existing houses and while he believes it should go ahead, he said he expects there will be problems.
“Every day I get out of bed I am asked about it,” he said.
Mr Beirne suggested that they ‘hold fire’ until the Road Design Office makes a presentation on the project but added that sometimes you have to make difficult choices.
He said that the land acquisition process was underway and was confident that the landowners would buy into the scheme in the same way they bought into the Greenway. However he said if there were problems with land, the scheme would ‘fall by the wayside’.