North Tipperary road maintenance ‘very poor’ as fears grow over further deterioration
Road maintenance in north Tipperary has been described as “very poor” by a local councillor during a discussion at February’s meeting of the Nenagh Municipal District.
At the district meeting, Fianna Fáil councillor John Carroll said that the level of maintenance on the roads has left a lot to be desired.
“The last five months have been pretty awful weather-wise, and I think everybody agrees, but very recently, we had flooding issues and I made a particular point of watching where the waters were emanating from. One particular area in Garrykennedy … there was a road crossing that was deficient at the best of times, but there was four pinch points where the water was building up, where the four culverts were blocked,” Cllr Carroll explained.
"The level of maintenance, to say it’s very poor is an understatement.”
He said that in several parishes he had seen “no maintenance” over the past five months despite severe weather conditions.
"If we continue the same level of no maintenance, I won’t say poor maintenance, but no maintenance, we’re going to be very vulnerable when the weather starts to change further,” Cllr Carroll said.
In response, a representative from the district’s roads section said these concerns are not unique to the Nenagh municipal area.
"The concerns you are raising here are repeated across the county, they’re not unique to the Nenagh district. The district engineers are doing as much work as they can and we’re banging the same drum here again with the funding they have available to them.
"Every penny of the budget gets spent, every bit of work that happens on the ground is done as can be afforded and maximised as much as possible. We appreciate the calls for extra work and extra maintenance, but again, we can only do it within the funds we have available,” the meeting was told.
Labour councillor Fiona Bonfield said that there are a lot of potholes on the roads around the district, and that she can’t blame the public for giving out.
"Is there a way that we can look at the potholes that are repeating and see can we do a permanent job, rather than coming out, filling it and it all washing out again?
"The public are seeing this and they’re giving out, and I don’t blame them,” she said.
In response to this, one of the district engineers said that the current weather conditions are the worst time to be trying to fill potholes, and that the council inherited some roads that are “flimsy, at best”.
"We’re filling them at the worst possible time in the worst possible conditions, it’s wet, it’s cold. We go out, we fill a pothole, we’re back two or three days later.
"The solution is that we keep falling back to the same problem which is drainage issues, and we’ve concentrated on opening inlets [to take water off the roads],” the meeting was told.
"We’re also stuck with a historical legacy that some of the road constructions are flimsy, at best, it’s a stone surface laid over another stone layer which is highly susceptible to penetrating water. A lot of our roads are of that construction and there’s very little we can do about it,” councillors heard.