Who will benefit from the A5 windfall?

Interesting to note Peter Robinson’s expression of regret over Brendan Howlin’s deferral of its end of the funding for the A5 dual carriageway project… It’s fairly clear he does not share Tom Elliott’s conviction that it was a mere white elephant…

Nevertheless he took care to suggest that the NI money must go into construction, mostly likely into other forms of capital spend… In Northern Ireland, where the car is king, you might bet that it will go into one or more dozen’s of projects shelved for what would have been a 60% spend of the current roads budget on the A5…

But some of the works on the Derry rail link were also suspended… With Derry City Council stumping up some of the cash, it may be that some of that redirected cash will go into completely that work..

In the meantime, as Sinn Fein’s Donegal based Westminster MP Pat Doherty’s off for a meeting to protest a decision by the southen state to spend its cash on more pressing domestic needs, it will be interesting to see how much of the benefits of that £400k come back to the west…

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty