Dunkettle Interchange: Last two pieces of mammoth road works are completed

Completion of the main construction works will be followed by a three-year maintenance period during which the operation of the interchange will be monitored.

Work on the complex engineering project has been likened to performing open heart surgery on a patient — while they are awake.

A total of 18 new road links have been built over 10km, while the amount of new pavement laid down is 150,000 sqm, which is about two-and-a-half times as big as Croke Park.

The million cubic metres of earthworks moved would be enough to fill 400 Olympic-sized swimming pools while the total 22,500m length of drainage pipes installed is about two-and-a-half times as tall as Mount Everest.

Despite improvements in traffic flow, Cork County Council has said that it is too early to say if increased traffic queuing from the East Cork side into the Jack Lynch Tunnel will become commonplace.

Concerns have been raised by local councillors that traffic queues approaching Dunkettle from its eastern side are getting worse.

They have also claimed that the traffic flow from East Cork into the tunnel and into Cork City has not improved since the Dunkettle works were undertaken. 

A night-time working blitz in recent weeks got the project to its completion milestone on Monday. 

A range of localised resurfacing and waterproofing works were required across the vast construction site before the scheme could be fit for use by motorists.

Originally, it was envisaged that the project — which was compared in 2011 to the revamp of the traffic bottleneck at the Red Cow in Dublin — would cost €100m and that construction would start in 2014.

A contract for the first phase was awarded in 2018, but the project was delayed when the State and the contractor, Sisk, failed to agree on a price for the second, main phase. While ground investigation works continued, the main construction contract was not awarded to Sisk until October 2020. Work has been ongoing for the last four years, with the overall cost expected to exceed €200m.

The interchange the junction of four national roads, the M8 Cork - Dublin Motorway, the N25 Cork - Waterford / Rosslare route, the N40 Cork South Ring Road and the N8 Dunkettle - Cork city National Route

Around 120,000 vehicles pass through the interchange on the busier days of the week.