NI politicians more focused on posturing than crumbling roads

Leaders debate while our infrastructure continues to disintegrate

THERE’S a beast of a pothole on the road outside my house. It’s huge. It sits there, like a trap for the unwary, waiting to catch unsuspecting vehicles coming round the corner. Our street is made of very old concrete, and the pothole was formed by a large chunk of the stuff breaking loose, like an island, and submerging itself below the surface of the road.

As an experiment, I went outside and jumped up and down on it, to see what would happen. The dislodged concrete made a disturbing, squelching noise.

God knows what kind of watery hell-swamp lies beneath. Every morning I look out the window, expecting to see that a sinkhole the size of a double-decker bus has opened up, maybe with a bus itself stranded in it.

Potholes are fast becoming the curse of the entire country.

According to the Labour Party, Britain’s roads could have more than 100 times as many potholes as there are craters on the moon.

The UK had more than a million potholes last year, said the party, while astronomers estimate that there are more than 9,000 craters on the moon — hence that eye-catching claim.

Angela Rayner, the shadow local government secretary (who currently has more pressing personal issues to contend with than holes in the road) said: “Under the Tories, Britain’s roads look more like the surface of the moon than the safe, secure roads that taxpayers left counting the cost of damaged tyres expect.”

It’s true that potholes have been around for ages — literally. According to the RAC, the term “pothole” can be traced back to the Roman Empire, when potters who could not afford clay stole from roads built on a layer of clay, creating deep holes in the surface.

While the damnable things are now caused by the effects of weather and traffic over time, not rogue potters, the underlying problem is a lack of proper road maintenance.

Earlier this year, a UK survey found that 107,000 miles of local roads are “fast reaching the end of their lives” as a result of potholes.

According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, spending on UK roads in 2019 was just over half of what was spent in 2006. Last month, the Annual Local

Authority Road Maintenance (Alarm) survey warned that the road network is reaching “breaking point” as the sum needed to tackle the repair backlog passed £16bn for the first time.

Here in Northern Ireland, the number of reports of potholes doubled in 2023.

Potholes and road defects cost the Department for Infrastructure (DFI) over £25m in a five-year period in settled public liability claims. A total of 10,982 successful claims were made between April 2018 and the end of March 2023. The exact figure paid out was £25,322,556.22.

The shambolic state of our roads is the result of decades of under-investment.

Basically, it’s cheaper to pay drivers for the damage to their vehicles than to go out and fix all the potholes.

This is why the grandiose posturing of local politicians, and their tedious, obsessive focus on nationhood, territory and the constitutional issue, really gets my goat.

They have such a wire about themselves, acting as if their petty sectarian squabbles are matters of high state, far above the everyday concerns of most people.

In this they’re encouraged by elements of the media, who hang breathlessly on their every word, earnestly debating the significance of the most banal or trivial pronouncement. What a joke.

Meanwhile, our streets, schools and hospitals are falling apart. But who cares about endless waiting lists, crumbling school buildings and dangerous, disintegrating roads when there’s the unique status of our statelet to dispute? Who cares about the present when all the iniquities of the past are still available to debate?

Lost on their absurd political power trips — energies consumed by shoring up their side of the sectarian divide — our swaggering leaders have no space left in the diary for attending to such apparently humdrum issues.

Yet these are the things that make the most difference to the basic quality of our lives.

As for the gaping pothole outside my front door, I have gone online and reported it to the relevant authority. But I don’t expect to get an answer, let alone see it fixed any time soon.

Perhaps when the infrastructure gets so bad that Northern Ireland itself collapses into the swamp and disappears, the politicians will finally take notice.

More likely, they’ll just keep on fighting.