There is a need for a once-off emergency roads budget for County Wexford. We have suffered enormous devastation from flooding, and I have previously raised the Enniscorthy flood relief scheme in this Chamber. I want to reflect for a moment on the impact of the floods on our roads network right across County Wexford. On Christmas Day 2021, when I was a county councillor, five bridges in my parish vanished as a result of flooding. There was devastation across the roads network. The then Minister for Transport provided a once-off stimulus measure of €4 million to reflect the impact and the damage the extreme weather event had had on the roads network, including funding for bridge repairs. Wexford County Council is carrying out an assessment of the scale and likely cost of the damage done by the recent flooding to the roads network. I met with the head of the roads section on Friday and he said it is going to take a bit longer to fully get to grips with the situation because there has been so much damage to roads right across County Wexford.

I implore the Minister for Transport to take seriously that request from Wexford County Council when it comes and to provide the funding. It is going to take the crews and repair workers an enormous amount of time to get the roads back to where they were, and to be honest about it, they were not in a great place to begin with. We must have a stimulus package when that request comes in to ensure we can put the roads back to the condition the people of County Wexford rightly deserve them to be in.