Longford County Council has ‘significant demands’ on roads budget

The road works programme for the Ballymahon Municipal District Area will get underway in the next four weeks.

Area Engineer Brian McNeela gave details of the €3.67M budget at the March MD meeting of the authority. Mr McNeela said with over 519 kilometres of road in the Municipal District Area there are significant demands on the budget.

“It is a huge body of work,” he told the councillors. Explaining the local authority are in the second year of a three year programme he spoke of the “significant challenges” presented by the recent weather conditions.

Thanking members for their input into the programme he commended council staff in the Roads Department for the work put into the development of the Roads Programme. Mr McNeela said he hopes many issues raised by the elected members will be dealt with. He told the MD that contractors have been selected and expressed his hopes they would “hit the ground running in the next four weeks”.

Cllr Gerard Farrell (FG) voiced concerns about recent weather and its potential to impact on the progress of the proposed works.
“It is good to see that a few roads I have been nagging about are included in the programme,” said Cllr Farrell.

Party colleague Cllr Colm Murray, wondered if any roads damaged in the last few weeks could be considered for work under the programme, or if it was set in stone. Cllr Mark Casey said addressing road decay because of winter weather conditions should be factored into the budget. He highlighted a particular footpath in Lanesboro as something the local authority should consider.
Cllr Mick Cahill pointed out that although there is a “great standard of road works in the MD area”, he was concerned about the impact of heavy machinery by State body Coilte.

“They cause damage to the road when they harvest trees. Repairing these roads is costing us a lot of money. We should be able to recoup the money. We are coming into an election year, every penny we spend on roads is important,” Cllr Cahill said.

Speaking after the meeting, Cllr Pat O'Toole said improvements committed to under the works programme in Ballymahon are significant: “This has been an area I have been trying to get improvement works on for quite a number of years. It's at Drynan just beyond the Vocational School. Every time we have heavy rain we have serious flooding there.

“It's been very close to causing accidents on several occasions. I am delighted to see, after many years of prompting, it has been included on the roads programme. Hopefully it will be done by the summer. It will be a great boon to the area.”