Cllr Frank McBrearty
A dedicated influx of funding should be given to Donegal to fund the up-keep and repair roads and bridges, says election candidate Frank McBrearty.
Cllr Mc Brearty is the current Chairman of the Stranorlar Municipal District and sits today to to agree the new three year programme.
Last year’s report said that if Donegal continues to get the same level of funding that it is currently receiving from Government, roads will get worse and it would take 37 years to just try and keep the roads the same as they are now.
Donegal has over 6000 KM of roads, all of which are in desperate need of government funding and the opposite seems to happening, even this year’s funding allocated to Donegal is slightly less.
Cllr Mc Brearty commented “We need new investment in roads and in particular bridge repairs and maintenance. We also need a large number of new bridges in particular Castlefinn, Clady and Ballindrat. These are only some examples, as the people of Donegal know, the entire county needs work!”
Under the new rules the new 5 MDs can introduce local improvement schemes known as LIS schemes which benefits local farmers & residents that live on private roads and lanes throughout the county. There has not been any extra funding from Government over the last number of years for Donegal County Council to re-enter LIS schemes. However if Donegal decided to do so then the local roads would suffer even more as they would have even less money spent on them.
Cllr Mc Brearty continued “People pay car tax for a reason, for the up keep and maintenance of roads. I believe that all money collected in Donegal should stay in Donegal, along with the current level of funding that is given to Donegal County Council. This would go a long way to fixing our roads but instead it goes a long long way, all the way to Dublin in fact”
In 2015 Cllr Mc Brearty had a motion supported by full council, calling on the Government to give Donegal an exceptional needs payment of €100 million in order to deal with the Health & Safety problems we have concerning our local roads in the County, sadly this was ignored.
He added “The local road are inadequate for travelling in and out of Donegal and in particular the school bus routes”
According to Cllr Mc Brearty the current Government and previous governments Fianna Fail and the Green party bankrupt the country which left it difficult for county’s to ask for extra funding for issues like roads.
“Fine Gael and Labour have continued with their unfair policies. Donegal County Council are unable to put forward any extra funding to roads due to the severe deficit they face on a yearly basis with a legacy debt of over €150million. If the Government and the previous Government had bailed them out, this would have allowed our local authority the chance to finance a certain level of roads funding.”
Cllr Mc Brearty went on to say “Your county councillors in the Stranorlar MD will meet today to try and agree the new 3 year programme, there is no guarantee who’s roads will be done first or how many we can get onto the programme. Politicians that are not current county councillors should not be making commitments for people’s roads to be fixed as they have no power to do so and if they make these false promises I urge you to make them put it in writing so you can use it against them if elected and your roads don’t get fixed.”
“There needs to be accountability at Local and National levels and if elected I will stand up for this”
