Roads in Ireland

The island of Ireland, comprising Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, has an extensive network of tens of thousands of kilometres of public roads, usually surfaced. These roads have been developed and modernised over centuries, from trackways suitable only for walkers and horses, to surfaced roads including modern motorways. Driving is on the left-hand side of the road. The major routes were established before Irish independence and consequently take little cognisance of the border other than a change of identification number and street furniture. Northern Ireland has had motorways since 1962, and has a well-developed network of primary, secondary and local routes. The Republic started work on its motorway network in the early 1980s; and historically, the road network there was once somewhat less well developed. However, the Celtic Tiger economic boom and an influx of European Union structural funding, saw national roads and regional roads in the Republic come up to international standard quite quickly. In the mid-1990s, for example, the Republic went from having only a few short sections of motorway to a network of motorways, dual carriageways and other improvements on most major routes as part of a National Development Plan. Road construction in Northern Ireland now tends to proceed at a slower pace than in the Republic, although a number of important bypasses and upgrades to dual carriageway have recently been completed or are about to begin.
Roads in Northern Ireland are classified as either Highways, motorways, A-roads, B-roads and other roads. There are two types of A-roads: primary and non-primary.
Roads in the Republic are classified as motorways, national roads, regional roads and local roads. There are two types of national roads: national primary routes and national secondary routes.
Road signs in Northern Ireland follow the same design rules as the rest of the United Kingdom. Distance signposts in Northern Ireland show distances in miles, while all signposts placed in the Republic since the late 1970s use kilometres. The Republic's road signs are generally bilingual, using both official languages, Irish and English. However, signs in the Gaeltacht use only Irish. The Irish language names are written in italic script, the English in capitals. Signs in Northern Ireland are in English only. Warning signs in the Republic have a yellow background and are diamond-shaped, those in Northern Ireland are triangle-shaped and have a white background with a red border.
Speed limits in Northern Ireland are specified in miles per hour. Those in the Republic use kilometres per hour, a change introduced on 20 January 2005. This involved the provision of 58,000 new metric speed limit signs, replacing and supplementing 35,000 imperial signs.

History

There have been routes and trackways in Ireland connecting settlements and facilitating trade since ancient times. Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire and, therefore, Roman roads were not built in Ireland. However, an Iron Age road with a stone surface has been excavated in Munster, and togher roads, a type of causeway built through bogs, were found in many areas of the country.
According to an entry in the Annals of the Four Masters for AD 123, there were five principal highways leading to Tara in Early Medieval Ireland.
Early medieval law-tracts set out five types of road including the highway, the ' main road', the 'connecting road', the 'side road' which could be tolled, and the 'cow road'. Bóthar is the most common term for 'road' in modern Irish: its diminutive form, bóithrín, is used as a term for very narrow, rural roads.
The development of roads in Ireland seemed to have stagnated until the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries. However, in the 18th century, a network of turnpike roads was built: "a turnpike was a primitive form of turnstile – a gate across the road, opened on payment of a toll. The average length of a turnpike road was 30 miles". Routes to and from Dublin were developed initially and the network spread throughout the country. Turnpikes operated between 1729 and 1858 when the extensive railway network made them increasingly unpopular.
Specialist routes to facilitate the butter trade, which centred on Cork, were built in Munster. The first butter road was commissioned in 1748 and was built by John Murphy of Castleisland in County Kerry. In other areas, notably in County Wicklow, military roads were built to help secure British military control over remote areas. The Military Road through County Wicklow was begun in 1800 and completed in 1809. The R115 is part of the Military Road for its entire length.
Railways became the dominant form of land transport from the mid-19th century. This situation persisted until the first half of the 20th century when motorised road transport gradually began to take over from railways as the most important form of land transport.
Pre-independence legislation laid the foundation for the regulation of the modern system of public roads in Ireland. The Act gave the Minister for Local Government the power to classify roads: Trunk Road Funds were used to enable local councils to improve major roads and road surfacing was gradually undertaken throughout the 1920s, 1930s and beyond.
By the 1950s an established system of road classification and numbering with trunk roads and link roads had long been developed. The present system of road classification and numbering began in 1977 when twenty-five national primary roads and thirty-three national secondary roads were designated.
Regional roads were first formally designated in 1994, although regional road route-numbers began appearing on signposts in the 1980s. The Roads Act 1993 also classified all public roads which are not national or regional roads as local roads.

Roads in the Republic of Ireland

The Republic has an extensive network of public roads connecting all parts of the country. As of May 2018 the lengths of each road type, and overall length of the network, are as follows.

Road type	Length	Length
National roads	5,413	3,363
National primary roads		-
National secondary roads		-
Regional roads	13,124	8,155
Local roads	81,293	50,513
Local primary roads		-
Local secondary roads		-
Local tertiary roads		-
Total	99,830	62,031

The Republic's major road network is focused on Dublin. Motorways were extended from Dublin to other major cities as part of the Transport 21 programme which aimed to have a world-class motorway network in place by the end of 2010. At that time, Ireland's main cities excluding Derry were connected to Dublin with motorways or with near-motorway standard roads. Dublin was the focus of some other major projects, such as the East-Link and West-Link toll-bridges, as well as the Dublin Port Tunnel. Major by-pass projects were also built around other cities and towns. The Jack Lynch Tunnel under the River Lee in Cork was a major project outside Dublin, and a fourth crossing at Limerick under the River Shannon opened in 2010.
The different classes of roads in Ireland are allocated blocks of numbers so that no number is used more than once save in the case of local primary roads. Not all road numbers are currently in use.

Motorways

In the Republic of Ireland, a motorway forms part of a national primary route, but is indicated by the prefix "M" instead of "N". Motorways are the highest standard roads and certain drivers and vehicles are prohibited from using them. The motorway network has been expanded extensively since the 1990s, through construction of new motorways and redesignation of existing motorway-standard dual-carriageway sections of national primary routes.
The first motorway section in the state was the M7 Naas by-pass, which opened in 1983. At the end of 2004 there were of motorway in the Republic and of dual-carriageway. This was extended, by the end of 2005, to of motorway and of dual-carriageway, including 2+1 roads. By the end of December 2009 there were of motorway in Ireland, with under construction at the time.
In June 2007, it was announced that around of 'new' motorway would be created; however, much of this resulted from the re-classification of most of the country's high-quality dual carriageways to motorway regulations rather than the construction of purpose-built motorways. This affected most of the major inter-urban routes between Dublin and various towns and cities and some of the Atlantic Corridor along the Western seaboard.
By 2015, TII planned that there would be approximately of motorway in Ireland, comprising the M50, M20, M18, M17, M11, M9, M8, M7, M6, M4, M3, M2, and M1. However the Irish financial crisis brought this target into question.

National primary roads

National primary routes form the main cross country roads in Ireland and include all motorways. This category of road is numbered from 1–50 with the prefix "N". The routes numbered N1-N11 radiate anti-clockwise from Dublin, with those in the range N12-N26 being cross-country roads and N27-N33 being newer short link roads. The N40 is the Cork Ring Road and the N50 is the Dublin Ring Road. National secondary roads are numbered under the same scheme with higher numbers.
Northern Ireland route sections are in some cases included in a theoretical complete cross-border route – for example the N3 route, which re-enters the Republic.

National secondary roads

National secondary roads fill in the rest of the main cross country routes in Ireland. They connect large towns which are not served by national primary routes, and some routes follow long coastal route connecting many towns. They are indicated with a "N" prefix followed by a number from 51 to 99.
As of 2018, there are of national secondary roads in Ireland, making up slightly less than 50% of the entire national route network. National secondary routes are generally more poorly maintained than primary routes, but often carry more traffic than regional roads. Almost the entire network of national secondary roads is single carriageway, although there are some short sections of dual carriageway on the Tallaght bypass section of the N81, on the N52 at Dundalk, on the N85 at Ennis, on the N62 at Athlone and on the N71 between Cork and Bandon.
Typically, national secondary roads are of a similar standard or higher than regional roads although some are of lower quality than the better sections of regional roads. Many of them have been resurfaced with higher quality pavements in recent years with relatively smooth surfaces and good road markings and signposting. However, road widths and alignments are often inadequate, with many narrow and winding sections.
National secondary roads generally do not bypass towns on their routes although there are a number of exceptions: the N52 bypasses Nenagh, Mullingar and the centre of Dundalk with a further N52 bypass of Tullamore planned, the N55 bypasses Cavan, the N56 forms part of the Donegal bypass, the N61 and the N63 bypass Roscommon, the N71 bypasses Halfway and Skibbereen, the N74 bypasses Cashel, the N76 bypasses Callan, the N77 forms the northern part of the Kilkenny ring road, the N80 bypasses Carlow and the N85 bypasses Ennis. When the Fermoy to Kilbehenny section of the M8 was completed, the former N8 bypass of Mitchelstown was re-classified as the N73.