Councillors allocate funding to Laragh and Roundwood projects

TWO MAJOR projects will be funded by Wicklow Municipal District this year through its discretionary fund.

Speaking at Monday’s meeting of Wicklow Municipal District Cllr John Snell said that this year’s discretionary fund was €126,750 while there was €12,500 left over from last year.

He said that a total of €58,000 would be used to install safety works in Laragh Village from Beechwood to the GAA pitches. He said that this loop is used by many tourists and locals and it had been in the pipeline for a long number of years.

‘We were lobbied hard this and we think it is a worthy project’, he said.

‘Laragh gets 1.5 million visitors a year and these works will be good for pedestrian safety.’

He said that a further €55,000 will be used to fund a footpath in Roundwood village heading out towards the football club.

‘ The footpath is really needed there for the safety of all the children and we are all delighted to support this. We hope to see it completed in a few months.’

Cllr Snell said that €10,000 will be used for resurfacing works in the public carpark in Rathnew while a further €5,000 will be used for a memorial garden on the Murrough and a further €2,000 will be used for the installation and sourcing of two benches in the garden.

Cllr Snell said that the council will see how these projects fare before spending the remainder of the money. He said that hopefully engineer Paul Byrne would be able to find savings along the way.

He thanked all the members for their work on the discretionary funding saying it hadn’t been easy to decide which projects to support. ‘ There were lots of haggling and arguing but everyone looked at the bigger picture. We have a huge geographical area to cover and we tried to do our best for the area.’

Cllr Irene Winters said Cllr Snell had been very fair and ‘given everyone a chance to make their input. We’ve done an awful llot of work to get the best possible value to provide people with the best possible services.’

Cllr Shay Cullen agreed saying that they had tried to be fair to the district as a whole and said that ‘please God next year we’ll have more funds to distribute across the district’.

Cllr Gail Dunne said the projects were all very worthy and would benefit East Wicklow. However he said that ‘next year is another year and hopefully we’ll get to some projects we didn’t get to this year’.

Cllr Daragh Nolan said the projects chosen would bring a lot of benefit to people going forward.