Road tops DUP’s building wish list

The Democratic Unionist Party’s key construction cash priority is a £150m project to tackle Belfast’s biggest traffic bottleneck.

The DUP, whose 10 Westminster MPs are set to prop up the Tories in government, listed a string of infrastructure priorities in its 2017 election manifesto, headed Rebuilding Northern Ireland.

David Fry, assistant director of the Construction Employers Federation in Belfast, identified the York Street interchange at the intersection of the M1, M2 and M3 roads as the one major scheme identified by the DUP not covered by Northern Ireland’s existing budget.

“This project was due to receive EU money as it connects with the Irish Republic, so is part of a pan-European network, but obviously that funding is unlikely now,” he said. “Everything else on the DUP manifesto has a budget line, though they might ask for it to be brought forward. There’s a question over how long this government will last so the DUP will want to get any spending commitments out of them as quickly as possible.”