Despite increases in Government funding over the past few years for the non-national road network, county councillors will be unable to carry out annual programmes as comprehensive as they had planned. This is due to the enormous increase in the costs of road maintenance and road construction products over the past 18 months. In any mid-year review of the capital programme, the Government must prioritise this roads programme for much-needed additional funding. Some 95.7% of the entire road network in my own county of Cavan is non-national. That demonstrates very clearly the importance of such roads and the need to have them brought up to an acceptable standard, both from a social and economic point of view.

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue, which he has been raising consistently over the past while. I have spoken to the Minister in respect of this and we are very conscious of the need for maintenance of country, rural and regional roads. We will continue to pursue this in terms of any available resources we can allocate this year to deal with the fact that the costs of the materials that go into repairing a road, repurposing a road, etc., have gone up. We need to deal with that.