"It means that all roads no longer lead to Dublin."
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has warned that there would be no
big surprises or shock announcement in today's budget which will be delivered by Minister Paschal Donoghue at 1pm.
However, try telling the people of Munster or in fact anyone that is a regular visitor to the south that funding for a new motorway connecting Limerick and Cork wouldn't be a big announcement.
According to the Limerick Leader, it is very likely that this budget will see the long-awaited Limerick to Cork motorway getting a budget boost.
This boost could possibly help progress the motorway further along the planning stage after it was announced that Varadkar was eager to build
the new motorway "in due course."
Varadkar had originally scrapped the idea of building the new road back in 2011 but now is strongly behind the link between the two counties.
He has also said that the infrastructure could be
finished as early as 2022, a year before Ireland potentially host the Rugby World Cup.
It is estimated that up to €20 million could be put aside for the new link which hasn't seen much uptake since former Finance Minister, Michael Noonan, announced the scheme back in 2015.
In a video that Varadkar released on the same day when the new Gort to Tuam motorway was opened, he made his intentions clear that the motorway wouldn't just stop in Galway:
"It’s (the M17/M18) part of a future Atlantic Corridor which is going to link the entire western seaboard so with this now in place we are going to have a motorway linking Galway to Clare and Clare onto Limerick and in due course we will link Limerick to Cork as well and that’s important because it means that all roads no longer lead to Dublin."
The creation of the M17 marked the first continuous motorway or high-quality dual carriageway that has been achieved between two Irish cities (Galway and Limerick) where neither is Dublin.
