Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Deputy; when they are allocated the money, they would want to spend it. I like to keep the pressure on to spend it, because if they do not spend the money, I have to give back. It is not that easy to get in the first place.

As the Deputy knows, €114 million has been spent in the past five to six years. I would love to put more money into funding the LIS. I did put more in this year and last year. In total, I allocated an additional €16 million in July of this year. The funding must be spent on upgrade works by local authorities within the calendar year. We understand, as the Deputy does, that local authorities have competing priorities and different levels of ambition and they are faced with capacity constraints that vary from authority to authority. Each local authority decides locally what works are prioritised to be submitted to my Department for funding.

In 2021 and 2022, I doubled the allocation for the LIS using savings that were identified within the Department. In 2023 alone, I allocated almost €30 million to the scheme. As the Deputy knows, the lanes are the same as roads in rural Ireland. There can be multiple houses on them. Cars drive on them. Milk lorries go up them. They need to have a decent surface. For that reason, LIS-like roads were always funded by the Department of Transport. The Department of Transport has a very large capital budget, far in excess of what my Department has. I have raised it with the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, on a number of occasions to see if that Department would co-fund. If they matched what I am putting in from my Department it would make a huge hole in it. It really would get rid of those waiting lists. We have done a lot, and I can say that the lists are much shorter than they were five or six years ago, but we still have to keep working at it.

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