Editorial: The are strong safety and also connection reasons to upgrade the A5 road

Almost 20 years ago, before the financial crash, the Irish government pledged a vast amount of money to help upgrade the A5 road, between the border in Co Armagh and another part of the frontier near Londonderry. When the property crash on both sides of the border began crashing in 2008, and with it the Irish economy, this paper observed with sadness that such money would not be forthcoming.

Some unionists including the late Lord Laird have been suspicious of plans to upgrade the A5 road. He speculated that it was an attempt to take back land in revenge for the plantation. But we did not share that view. There are projects on which north and south should easily be able to co-operate, such as the Belfast to Dublin railway line, or the radically improved road that runs alongside it, between the two capitals. It has taken a long time for the Republic’s economy to recover and now there is fresh talk of assistance from the Irish state.

The route is important to them because it is a strategic one between Dublin and Londonderry and then on to Letterkenny and Donegal. It is important within Northern Ireland for similar reasons – it carries traffic on a key arterial route in the west of the province.

However, this newspaper has long advocated road upgrades for a more fundamental reason: motorways and expressway-standard dual carriageways slash death tolls. They manage this for the very simple reason that they have a barrier in the central reservation which makes impossible right turns across the road in front of oncoming traffic. The upgrades of the A1, A4, A6 and A26 roads to such a standard has seen the death tolls on them plummet. The A5 has had a grim safety record. For that and interconnectivity reasons it is badly in need of an upgrade, as this inquiry is likely to conclude.