New Ross to receive lion’s share of €13.49m emergency roads funding as council reveals how money will be distributed

By Simon Bourke, Wexford People

Having fielded calls from all of Wexford’s 34 councillors, each of them asking for more money than the last, the man responsible for the upkeep of roads in the county has finally revealed how the recently acquired €13.49m war chest will be distributed.

That money has been allocated to Co Wexford to repair roads damaged by Storm Chandra earlier this year and, within hours of its arrival, director of roads with Wexford County Council (WCC) Eamonn Hore had been inundated with requests asking just how it would be allocated.

And those queries continued at the July meeting of WCC where first Councillor Michael Sheehan and then Cllr Pat Barden insisted that their New Ross district receive the bulk of the money.

On this occasion their prayers were at least partially answered.

Explaining that the application to the Department of Roads had included 146 roads from across Co Wexford, Mr Hore revealed that the highest number of those roads were located within the New Ross Municipal District (NRMD).

“Every single councillor has contacted me to say the roads in their district are the worst, but the application included roads from across the county,” he said. “In the NRMD there were 49 roads damaged during the storms, in the Rosslare district there were 32 roads, in Enniscorthy there were 29, in the Wexford Borough there were 22, and there were 14 in Gorey Kilmuckridge.”

That list was compiled by each of Wexford’s five district engineers before being submitted to the department as part of an application which originally requested €20m. And Mr Hore said works would be carried out on each and every one of the roads on that list.

“We will endeavour to do something on every one of those roads. Some of them will be fully resurfaced, while extensive patching and surface dressing will be done on the rest. We will make them all passable.”

Mr Hore also revealed that €2.5m of the money had been spent in advance of the funding being announced.

The €13.49m received in Wexford was the highest of any county in the country. A total of €40m was allocated between nine different counties to repair roads damaged by Storm Chandra with Wicklow (€10.72), Waterford (€5.53m), Kilkenny (€3.46m), and Carlow (€2.79m) all receiving less than Wexford.