Brian Stanley (Laois, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I ask the Minister of State to address the situation of Mountmellick, which has been promised a relief road for a long number of years. It still has not happened and it is very important we get it.

Mountmellick town has been neglected badly over the years in terms of infrastructure. This has been talked about and promised for about 30 years. Various options have been looked at for the route to take. There was a route from beside the mill on the Portlaoise road. That has changed and a better route has been selected. It needs to happen.

There was an announcement a couple of weeks ago of €663 million for roads projects and I was delighted to see it. When I checked down along the list, it had everywhere from Ballaghaderreen to Midleton and Youghal, but nowhere does Mountmellick figure in that long list. Limerick has four pieces of substantial infrastructure, Cork also has four and Laois has zero.

This route is badly needed to connect the Portlaoise road to the Tullamore road out of the town. This is the main route - the N80 - to Rosslare, which the Ceann Comhairle is very interested in. Vehicles coming from the west of Ireland use it, particularly HGVs. There are over 8,500 vehicles per day going through the centre of Mountmellick town, many of them HGVs. There are significant bottlenecks, particularly at the junction of Pearse Street and Sarsfield Street. It is difficult for them to get articulated trucks around it. The local hauliers association complains about it. It is also holding back the town to have HGVs and traffic trundling through every day and the middle of the town hollowed out from a business point of view. That is the simplest way I can put it. You cannot stop to do anything in the town. It is not friendly to walk around and it badly needs to be bypassed.

The feasibility study has been done, with €105,000 spent on it. The county council has done its job, it has done the assessments and studies and the preferred route is there. There are benefits to this. In the previous Government, there may have been a bit of an ideological thing about not putting in a bypass, but this would shorten journeys in distance and time. The relief road would shorten the journey by nearly 60% because you are cutting across country and not having to go into the town and wiggle in and out through streets. It would be a far shorter journey.

Like all new roads, it will have cycle lanes, and I fully support that. You cannot put cycle lanes on the existing streets of the town. That is just a fact of life. It is too dangerous. We need to get people using cycle lanes and bicycles.

It is an important project. Mountmellick is a substantial town with a large population. It is lacking in industry and infrastructure. This would benefit Mountmellick as well as travellers and drivers, particularly HGVs. We need to get this moving because there is now much more freight going to the port of Rosslare, particularly with Brexit. The number of HGVs going through Mountmellick has increased, so this is important. The port has been upgraded and new infrastructure has been put in. We need to put in the roads to feed into that. This road is part of that.

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