Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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Question 157: To ask the Minister for Transport if he will increase the funding to Kildare County Council for road restoration in the aftermath of severe weather conditions; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [46332/09]

Noel Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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The improvement and maintenance of regional and local roads is a statutory function of each road authority in accordance with the provisions of section 13 of the Roads Act 1993. The carrying out of works on these roads is a matter for the relevant local authority to be funded from its own resources supplemented by State road grants.

The initial selection and prioritisation of projects to be funded is also a matter for the local authority.

When Exchequer grants for regional and local roads are allocated each year, my Department does not hold back a reserve allocation, at central level, to deal with weather contingencies such as flooding. Holding back such an allocation would mean a reduction in the road grant allocations made to all local authorities at the beginning of each year.

The allocations made to local authorities are inclusive of a weather risk factor. Local authorities are expressly advised in the annual road grants circular letter that they should set aside contingency sums from their overall regional and local roads resources to finance necessary weather related works.

My Department would be prepared to consider, sympathetically, any request from Kildare County Council to adjust their multi-annual restoration programme or revise their specific grant applications, in order to prioritise work in 2010 necessitated by the recent flooding.

As the Deputy will appreciate, local authorities, including Kildare County Council, are still assessing the extent of flood damage in their regions. Because these assessments cannot be completed until the flooding subsides, I expect that it will take some time before the damage sustained by regional and local road networks in recent days and the cost of their repair can be quantified.