Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire. I do not think anybody will complain about any moneys for the local improvement scheme; obviously the more the merrier. We are all aware of the necessary works that have been done and while local authorities will, in normal times, be able to prioritise, the problem with this is that the huge level of damage done by the recent flooding has impacted on a huge number of lanes that even the people who live on them may not have considered until now. As I say, in some instances we are talking about cases where there is nearly no road and no short-term mitigation or whatever is going to deal with that. We have already seen roads that at times were probably dealt with by the CIS where the local authority had no choice but to deal with those. Therefore, there is a particular anomaly here and we need to look at funding for those roads that are damaged by such freak scenarios as the recent flooding we had in north Louth.

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