Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the Minister and his staff for the presentation. An issue at the forefront of all our minds after the tragedies in the past month of road deaths is investment in roads. Some of the accidents happening are on roads with stretches that need work.

That road in County Carlow is one of those where applications have been made numerous times for works to be carried out on stretches of it that have become quite dangerous and that have a great deal of traffic. I do not wish to discuss that road in particular, given the tragedy that occurred on it in the past week, but there are similar roads around the country. While there is some funding in the Minister’s programme for work of that nature, it will not go far enough to make such roads safe. This is not to discount the personal responsibility that road users have to drive safely, but in many cases, the roads they are driving on are not safe to use because they were built for another age, and we need to acknowledge that. In the context of road safety, how much additional funding or emphasis can be placed on this issue in the budget for the coming year?