Approval has been granted by the National Roads Authority (NRA) to award a contract for the Kildare bypass. The approved tender at almost £60 million was submitted by Pat Mulcair Construction.
Work on the main contract for the bypass, which has been held up over environmental concerns about its effects on the Pollardstown Fen, is now expected to start within six weeks.
The NRA has confirmed that a recent delay was caused because the lowest tender was "significantly lower" than all other tenders.
The NRA was being cautious, because it was recently party to a settlement in which the construction firm, SIAC, was paid more than £3 million in compensation because it was not awarded a contract for the construction of improvements to the N21 near Adare, Co Limerick. By coincidence, the Limerick contract had been awarded to Mr Pat Mulcair, who the council and the NRA initially thought had submitted the lowest tender. However, the council and the NRA later admitted that "mathematical errors" were made in assessing the tenders.
For the Kildare bypass contract, the NRA employed an independent consultant to evaluate the tenders. Mr Mulcair's tender at almost £60 million was up to £10 million less than some previous estimates for the cost of the Kildare scheme.
A spokesman for the NRA yesterday confirmed that following the Limerick case it had introduced a "double checking" process recently. Kildare County Council is expected to sign the main contract for the bypass with Mr Mulcair immediately. If the contracts are not disputed by another contractor, machinery is expected on site within four to six weeks and the bypass will take three years to complete.
Clearance for the tendering process was given in January, after environmental concerns about the Pollardstown Fen had been addressed. The fen is a unique nature reserve, 4.5 km from the proposed bypass, and noted for a rare species of whorl snail and a special type of tufa spring.
For the first time in Irish roadbuilding a "tanking" system pioneered in the Netherlands will be used, the NRA said, to control groundwater drainage.
The N7 and N8 routes, from Dublin to Limerick and Cork, respectively, both go through Kildare town and at busy times traffic build-up in Kildare can stretch for up to five miles on either side of the town.