Southern relief road w/ Padraig O'Gorman fro Carlow County Council

You and all at Carlow County Council are putting the corridor for the Sudden Relief Road plans out for public consultation.

I know it's obviously a topic of conversation that's rolled on and on in Carlow for the last number of years.

Firstly, when is the public consultation opening?

Yeah so it's actually commencing today and what we're opening for public consultation is the emerging preferred route for the Carlow Southern Relief Road.

So we had a study area where we've been looking at all of the options of putting the route through along the southern corridor of the town and we now have as I say our confirmed position for the emerging preferred route and from within this route then the actual preferred route will be selected in the next few months.

So we're launching the public consultation today.

All of the potentially affected landowners were written to last week, and they have been given the opportunity to have one-to-one meetings and consultations with our own project team and the consultants, ACOM, and they've been taking up that opportunity over the last week.

And then we have two workshops this week for members of the general public.

The first one is this afternoon in the Talbot Hotel and later this week on Thursday afternoon in the Sevenoaks Hotel from 2 to 7 o'clock on both days.

So as things stand, you've in effect I suppose, to put it in simple terms, narrowed it down to an area of the town lands where the route would go through and you're looking to narrow it down further basically?

Yeah, correct.

So this route will commence up on the Hacklestown Road where the Eastern Southern Relief Road ends currently.

It will then come down south.

It'll cross the Browns Hill Avenue Road.

It will come down and cross the Tullow Road.

It'll cross the N80 Wexford Road.

There'll be a bridge crossing of the River Burren.

It'll then go across the south of the town.

It'll go over the railway crossing coming from the south to Waterford.

go on then to the Kilkenny Road, it'll cross there, cross the River Barrow, and then go up on the Leash side of Carlow and join the road network there.

So in total, it would be, when completed, about three kilometres of a circuit.