Sir, – I read with dismay your article "Misery on M7 to go on for months", (Home News, April 16th).
I took up a new job in January 2018 that saw me drive up the M7 once a week. I was initially pleased to see the road works on a long overdue traffic improvement project.
I am an engineer and a professional project manager and as the weeks went by it became apparent to me that the project was under resourced and that completion in 2018 wasn’t likely.
I say “under resourced”, putting it bluntly I would say that in driving the length of the entire site each week during spring and summer 2018, I could count on one or maybe two hands the number of people I saw working on the site. Resources only seemed to increase as the winter and the short evenings came along. It seems bizarre (or totally Irish) not to have a project of such importance, which is causing such traffic disruption, fully resourced to avail of the long Irish summer days.
I would have expected to see two shifts, six days a week, or at least two shifts five days a week.
If it takes a million hours to complete this project, then it takes a million hours. Sure there would be some additional expense for shifts and overtime, but seeing as it’s the likely to be the busiest road in Ireland, surely this should have been the plan? It seems this project was set up to fail from the start. – Yours, etc,
MIKE McEVOY BEng PMP,
Durrow, Co Laois.