Cathal Byrne (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I raise the issue of roads funding for my county of Wexford. It was confirmed in the budget that Wexford would receive an allocation of approximately €23 million, including €12 million for restoration and improvement, €1.5 million for maintenance and €520,000 for safety improvement measures. I appreciate we had a debate on road safety matters in the House this week. Wexford has approximately 3,500 km of roads. Owing to the good agricultural land in Wexford, we have more roads than would be typical for our population. There are approximately 163,000 people living in Wexford. Unfortunately, while we have an equal amount of people living in Donegal or Tipperary, those counties are receiving quite a substantial increase above the roads allocation for Wexford. I am especially conscious that Wexford County Council recently confirmed, through the director of services for roads, that we had the third-worst roads in Ireland when secondary and tertiary roads were compared. The programme for Government commits us to allowing a catch-up fund for counties that have roads in poor repair. I encourage the Government to commit to funding Wexford as part of that, given we have the third-worst roads in Ireland.