The upgrading of one of the east coast's most notorious stretches of roads, a 19km-link between the Rathnew and Arklow bypasses in south Co Wicklow on the N11, has been left out of the National Roads Authority construction programme for the third year in a row.
A large number of people have been killed on the single-carriageway stretch of road in the last decade, including five people who died in a school minibus in 1998.
Earlier that year two people were killed and seven injured on the same stretch of road which links the Beehive pub near Wicklow town to Scarnagh Cross, north of Arklow.
A three-car crash in March last year also claimed the life of an Arklow schoolteacher, while a young man was killed when his car collided with a truck in August 2005.
Two men were killed when their motorbike hit an unoccupied bus in June 2004, and two others were killed and five people injured in a two-car collision at Scarnagh Cross in July 2004.
In December 2002 one man was killed in an early-morning crash with another car; in October 2002 an Ashford man was found dead at the side of the road after an apparent hit-and-run, and last December a man was killed as he was crossing the road.
A compulsory purchase order for the land required to upgrade the road to dual carriageway status was confirmed by Bord Pleanála in January 2005, at which point Wicklow County Council was ready to implement the scheme.
But construction funding failed to appear in the National Roads Authority allocations in 2005, 2006 or 2007.
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