Does Ryan ‘guerrilla war’ row spell end of road for Coalition?
GREEN Party leader Eamon Ryan has hit back at claims by his Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael partners that his alleged attempts to frustrate the building of new roads have compromised people’s safety.
Speaking to Patrick Kielty on the Late Late Show, Mr Ryan claimed that while he would not rule out a coalition with Sinn Féin, the Green Party works well with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
But the growing tensions between Mr Ryan and his Coalition colleagues over an alleged ‘guerrilla war’ on road-building were articulated by Fine Gael TD Colm Brophy who said: ‘The only person who can get a road built in this country is JP McManus.’
In an indication of the frustrations building up among the senior Government partners over the failure of ongoing announcements to translate into actual roads, Mr Brophy also claimed: ‘The lack of road maintenance and road-building has made Irish roads more unsafe than five years ago.’
Fianna Fáil TD Barry Cowen, who was a key negotiator in the Programme for Government between the Greens and FF/FG, has also claimed that many of the projects shelved under Mr Ryan’s watch ‘were vital from a road safety perspective’.
Green sources moved to counter the claim, saying the Government had a strategy to halve road deaths. Significant work, they claimed, had been done in areas like e-scooters and road signs.
A spokesman for Mr Ryan claimed: ‘Road safety is a priority for Minister Ryan... Over the past two weeks, allocations have been made to regional and local roads and national roads and, in both cases, the emphasis has been on protection and renewal to ensure our road system is safe.’
Mr Ryan conceded that only a third of the road projects in the National Development Plan (NDP) can currently be built. There are €100billion worth of projects listed but, Mr Ryan noted, ‘only €35billion worth of funding to build them, so we have to have priority projects’.