Mr. William Carty:

On the problems associated with manufacturing and the service industry, there are two ways of looking at it. There are tangible problems such as, for example, most goods today need to move on time. In other words, goods are coming in and they are wanted today. One does not hold stocks anymore and it is important that goods get there on time. One problem with coming down these roads is that coming out of Dublin and heading west up to Ballina or Sligo through the midlands, a person will encounter a 40 or 50-mile stretch with a 120 km/h speed limit while the rest of the way, one is limited to 100 km/h. If a driver is lucky, he or she would get to travel at 80 km/h. I was coming to Dublin last week and outside Roosky I was confronted by four vans travelling in front of me. It took me an age to get to Longford and I was so frustrated that I stopped for a cup of coffee. It is important that everything moves quickly and is not held up. The reality of this situation is that transport costs go up because one is then paying for the time; the poorer the state of the road the more expensive the transport costs. Depending on the nature of the product, transport costs can be as much as 20% of the product cost and manufacturers are paying to have their goods sitting on the road.

The other side of the situation concerns the intangible - Mr. Corcoran alluded to it - where we have multinational companies and their executives coming with IDA Ireland to visit areas. If an investor arrives to Dublin and then has to travel to Ballina or Sligo, it is not a pretty journey. These people are obsessed with getting down a motorway; it is what they are used to in the US with their highways. The problem is they will come and have a look and one of their first comments is, "The roads here are terrible, it took so long to get here". Over the years I have met many people who have said this and once we hear that, we can forget about it. They are not going to come back. Worse still is when they head back to their cars, go to Dublin and the next day they may head for Galway or Limerick and have a lovely spin down. Once they go down either of those routes it is "Adios" and we will not see those guys back. This situation debilitates against the regions. This is a vast expanse of region as far as Letterkenny, down to Sligo, across to Ballina and Castlebar, down to Ballaghaderreen, Longford and Athlone. Those people are all being impacted by the state of that road. It is deficient. Those whole areas in the west were dealt a bad hand in the last decade. Obviously, other areas had been a priority and by the time it was getting around to the north west things changed. There is a deficiency there that needs to be redressed.