Toibin critical of funding shortage for road gritting

The lack of funding for road gritting in Meath during one of the most severe cold weather snaps in recent times, has alarmed Deputy Peadar Tóibin.

While the council grits all the national and regional roads, most local or county roads are not gritted,

Cllr Toibin said that residents in Coole, Summerhill had asked Meath County Council about salting the roads around the National school and Coole Montessori as the road is extremely bad during normal winter weather and cars have skidded in the past as the roads have not been salted.

"Approximately 200 children, staff and parents alone would travel this stretch on a daily basis.”

“I find this deeply concerning that there are whole areas of Meath which remain without being gritted due to lack of funding. Everyday we are hearing public road safety messages issued by the government, the Department of Transport and the RSA in relation to driver behaviour.

"Yet when it comes to crucial funding for road maintenance, with gritting being one of those safety measures, we are being told by local authorities the funding just isn’t sufficient.

"While severe cold weather snaps such as we have at the moment can often be short in duration, this in itself indicates that the requirements for funding annually are not overly excessive. Funding should therefore be available across the board at times when crucially needed as an important life saving measure. This would also help to reduce the negative impact to the economy, employment, education and public services which would offset the disruption and keep the financial costs during this time to an absolute minimum while also helping to avoid road traffic accidents.”

Meath County Council has pointed out they salt over 795km of roads across 11 routes in the county each time icy roads are predicted.

All National Primary, all National Secondary and all Regional Routes are salted. Approximately 22per cent by length of all roads in the county are treated.

The M1 (Dublin - Belfast), M2 (Ashbourne By-Pass), M3 (Clonee - Kells) and M4 (Dublin -Sligo - Galway) are taken care of by private entities and the Transport Infrastructure Ireland provides full funding to the Council for the salting of the National Road network.

"There is however no central funding for the Non-National (Regional and Local) Road Network. The Council makes limited resources available from its own maintenance funds towards the salting of the regional routes. The Council’s resources are fully utilised at present and there is no capacity to add any further routes to the Winter Maintenance Plan.

"The salting network represents the best prioritised extent of coverage based on road classification and strategic corridors, historic weather data, average daily traffic counts, population centres, location of businesses, the national public transport network and available funding."