Cork councils pay out €125k in pothole compensation

CORK COUNTY COUNCIL and its city counterpart received more than a third of all the complaints made by motorists about the state of the roads last year and between them paid out approximately €125,000 in compensation claims for damage caused to vehicles by potholes and badly maintained road surfaces, a TG4 investigation has uncovered.

According to information provided from the results of a series of Freedom of Information and media requests to local authorities from the TG4 current affairs programme, 7 Lá, Cork County Council received 4,620 complaints from motorists about pot holes and the poor state of the roads while there were 938 complaints about roads with potholes or ‘a category of road surface defect’ reported to Cork City Council.

This equated to 27% of the total number of claims received by the 31 local authorities who responded to Freedom of Information requests or media queries from the TG4 programme.

In a response to a Freedom of Information request to Cork County Council, the information released by the authority disclosed that there were 515 claims received in 2023 regarding pothole damage and 469 payments in respect of claims made.

The total amount of €111,529 was paid out in respect of those claims.

These figures were confirmed by Cork County Council’s communications office in response to a follow-up query by The Echo.

Cork County Council’s Freedom of Information Office declined to disclose the largest amount paid out in respect of a single claim.

It did disclose, however, that the company which insures all local councils, IFB, has a dedicated Pothole App for claimants to report road incidents and claims.

The response from Cork City Council’s communications office disclosed that 104 claims were received by the authority in respect of pothole damage and that 66 claims had been paid out. The total amount paid out in claims arising from pothole damage in 2023 was €13,955.06.

Cork City Council declined to give information about its procedure for dealing with pothole damage claims.

“This is proprietary information and will not be disclosed,” a spokesman said in a response to TG4.

“To do so would encourage the submission of potentially fraudulent claims and could also compromise or prejudice future investigation of claims by Cork City Council.”

At recent meetings of Cork County Council, the issue of the state of the roads has been a prominent item on the agenda.

In March, it was disclosed that Cork County Council’s 12,200km of regional and local roads, the largest network in the country, could only expect to be resurfaced once every 50 years due to the low level of funding in comparison to other counties.

According to figures disclosed by Cork County Council’s Director of Services for Roads and Transportation, Niall Healy, the local authority received €6,011 per kilometre while Limerick, for example, received €10,062.97 per km.