WHILE Fermanagh’s roads continue to crumble, with our infrastructure budget slashed in recent years, south of the border the Dublin government is pumping more and more money into rural roads in the north west.
Take our neighbours in Leitrim, for example. New figures show the budget for road repairs and maintenance in what is the smallest Irish county by population is almost twice the expected roads budget for the whole of the Fermanagh and Omagh district area.
The budget for Donegal is almost four times higher. It was recently announced by the Minister of State at the Department of Further and Higher Education, Marian Harkin, that the Leitrim budget for the year ahead would be increasing by ten percent, while the budget for Donegal roads would be going up by 17 percent.
As such, the roads repair budget for Donegal for 2025 is €42,425,000, which converts to just over £35 million, while the budget for Leitrim is €14,476,650, which is just over £12 million.
While a breakdown of the local roads budget for the Department for Infrastructures’s Roads department is not yet available for 2024-25, in 2023 a total of £7.9 million was spent by DfI on roads in Fermanagh and Omagh.
Given the Department has warned of a significant overall budget shortfall this year, of £117 million, it is very unlikely this will increase.
Indeed, at the end of last year, the Stormont infrastructure committee was warned that the North’s roads network was facing its biggest funding crisis in a quarter of a century, and that the under-investment could cost both jobs and lives.
Addressing the committee, which is chaired by Fermanagh MLA Deborah Erskine, members of the Mineral Products Association (MPA) pleaded with politicians to address the issue and find additional funding for the sake of public safety, and to prevent job losses.
“In the short term, there will be immediate job losses, we cannot keep apprentices employed with no work,” David Chambers from MPA NI told the committee.
“It’s going to have a serious impact on road safety because the resources aren’t going to be there to do the repairs and maintain the highways.”
Older generations in Fermanagh will remember a time when the North’s roads were of such superior quality to those in the South you didn’t need the checkpoints to know you’d crossed the border.
Sadly, you can still tell what side of the border you are on based on road quality, just the other way around.
Given the disparity in investment, it’s not hard to see why.
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