CLARE has received a supplementary allocation of €788,498 under the local improvement scheme (LIS) for rural roads and laneways.
Minister for Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht, Dara Calleary TD (FF) announced a further €14 million investment in rural roads and laneways across the country.
In Clare, a supplementary allocation of €788,498 was approved for Clare County Council which on top of the original allocation of €869,901 brings the county’s total funding for LIS to €1,658,399 in 2025. This total is behind the amount approved for Kerry, Cork and Tipperary in Munster.
Of the twenty five counties included in the LIS, Clare received the sixth highest total. The county allocations are based on the level of works that each local authority indicated they could complete before the end of the year
Eligible roads under the LIS are non-public roads providing access to parcels of land, of which, two or more are owned or occupied by different persons, one of which must be for agricultural/harvesting purposes, and non-public roads leading to important community amenities such as graveyards, beaches, piers, mountains.
Under the LIS, local authorities are responsible for identifying and prioritising roads for improvement works under the scheme, in consultation with residents/landowners.
Cllr Gabriel Keating (FG) told The Clare Echo the supplementary allocation was “long overdue”. He stated, “there should be no extra allocation, we should be getting the full amount at the beginning of the year because getting an allocation late in the year means you have to try spend it before the bad weather comes in. At the moment, we must have up on 90 applicants on a waiting list, it is a known fact that when we get an allocation of €800,000 or €900,000 it might only do a couple of roads in each of the Municipal District, it is never enough when you have a waiting list. At the same time I’m delighted we got it and we pushed hard to get it, very hard and it has come, the more the merrier”.
More focus is needed by Clare’s Oireachtas members on improving the quality of the county’s road network, he maintained. “I’d be calling on our Oireachtas members when they are looking at their budgets to look at the roads and the condition of them, our national roads, the N67, N68, our regional and local roads all need an injection of funding, if they don’t get funding soon they will be gone beyond redemption”.
A backlog of LIS applications still won’t be cleared by the additional funding, Cllr Rita McInerney (FF) flagged. “It is important to be clear; the LIS backlog in Clare is already years behind, and we are continually playing catch-up due to historic underinvestment. Even with this doubling of funding, we are still far from where we need to be to address the long list of applications from rural households and landowners”.
