Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Roads policing of 30 minutes is a red herring. I have spoken to many gardaí and they do that anyway. It is not something they needed to be instructed to do and it does not achieve anything additional. It is simply about the Commissioner and Department being able to tick a box.

When I looked at the 2024 budget when it was announced last year, I saw a cut of €150 million from the road safety and maintenance fund. That is still in effect. I received a letter a couple of weeks ago from the organisation that provides asphalt and tar for roads. It tries to plan in advance for its contracts. It wrote to the local authorities, which told it that they could not get funding from the Government for many of their planned programmes. The Minister of State claims that extra money has been put in place, but the reality on the ground is that communities are not seeing that money being spent because local authorities say they do not have it. I will provide an example. Carns National School in County Sligo is a little school on the road between Sligo town and Bundoran. It exits onto a national road, which presents considerable dangers. The local authority tells me that, if it wants to do anything at the crossroads, it first needs sanction from Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII. It can do nothing without having all kinds of engineers’ reports. Putting together all of the reports and data required of the local authority will cost it more than the actual job. This is the main problem in many situations. We are overburdened with red tape and no work is being done on the ground.

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