Consultants for Mallow relief road could be in place by end of this year

A SENIOR Cork County Council official has said that consultants could be appointed to Mallow Northern Relief Road project by the end of this year.

In a report given to the authority’s northern area committee this week the director of road services, Tom Stritch, said that €300,000 had been allocated to the scheme for this year.

He said that Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) had requested a project appraisal plan for the scheme but that the first draft was “not to their satisfaction” and therefore had to be redone.

“This is currently being worked on and we hope that it will be done quite quickly as we need to move on this,” he said.

“We will be ready to advertise for consultants, design engineers once TII give us approval, but cannot do this until that approval has been given,” Mr Stritch explained to councillors.

Mr Stritch said draft tender documents for the appointment of consultants had been completed and, once approved, would enable the preparation of documents for statutory procedures including design, Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs) for land along the proposed route and an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

These will then be submitted to An Bord Pleanála.

Cllr John Paul O’Shea (Ind) asked Mr Stritch for an update on when the consultants would be appointed and when the CPOs and EIS would be completed.

“It is important that we have clarity in relation to the Northern Relief Road. Mallow town centre needs a lot of attention and this will be key element to that,” he said.

In reply, Mr Stritch reiterated the point that the appointment of consultants depended on getting the project approved and tendered.

“So, you are probably speaking about six months before a consultant is appointed. There is no reason why we should not have the project ready to go to statutory procedures in nine months,” said Mr Stritch.

However, his comments did come with the warning that “we have been down this road before with the Northern Relief Road”, thus intimating that this was by no means a hard and fast time-line.

“Members will have to realise that because the capital framework appraisal comes from national level, every project that we do has to go back up to central government at each stage for approval,” said Mr Stritch.

“We have to go through a very comprehensive set of steps to get approval, even on projects that have gone a long way down the road.

“This might only be a matter of form, but these things have to happen,” Mr Stritch emphasised to councillors.