Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the final sentence of the Minister's response, where he says that he will examine ways to give more support to local authorities. That needs to be done now. I have been highlighting this issue since 2020. The incessant rainfall has done damage even to relatively good roads. Cavan and Monaghan depend heavily on the non-national road network. In County Cavan, 96% of the road network is made up of local and regional roads. They carry significant volumes of heavy goods traffic and 92% of County Cavan is covered by drumlin soils, mountain and hill peats, which causes difficulty in maintaining a road network.

The Minister talked about local authorities' own resources. The local authorities in Cavan and Monaghan have very limited resources because they do not have a funding base. They are not like Fingal County Council, South Dublin County Council or Dublin City Council, which have vast amounts of resources available to them. To the credit of the councillors, the county councils in Cavan and Monaghan decided to put in substantial resources, allied to the Government grants, over the years. However, we do not have enough of a financial contribution from the Department of Transport to carry out the road works programme we need to undertake. People living on regional, county and local roads and on laneways are as entitled to a proper standard of road to their homes, businesses and farms as the people living along motorways or in city areas where there are public transport systems, public lighting and so on.

It is time to stop the examination and to allocate additional resources. We need it this year because of the damage that has been done. As the Minister will know - he has agreed with me when answering questions previously - it is a good investment to protect the roads that are in reasonable condition because, the longer roads are allowed to deteriorate for, the bigger the bill for our local authorities will be.

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