Compulsory Purchase Orders for the first stage of the proposed new Dublin to Waterford highway are to be announced by Kildare County Council this morning. The 46-km dual carriageway is to be built at a cost of about €488 million - or €10.6 million a kilometre.
The road will not be classed a motorway however, but a high-grade dual carriageway. It will link the existing M9 at Kilcullen with Powerstown in Co Carlow. The route will bypass Carlow town and Castledermot to the east and include a new link to Athy.
Its 43 new bridges and culverts will encompass four new road junctions, as well as flyovers over local roads and rivers. The route passes east and then south of Carlow and stops at Powerstown, just north-east of the Barrow.
The road was identified in the National Development Plan as a key inter-urban route linking Dublin with the south-east.
Documentation on the southern section of the route from Powerstown to Waterford is expected to be published shortly. This will bring the new road from Powerstown east of Kilkenny city and south to Waterford City.
The National Development Plan envisaged this route being completed by the end of 2007, one year later than the other inter-urban routes.
However, the Department of Transport and the National Roads Authority (NRA) accept that "some slippage with these dates has occurred".
At almost half a billion euro for this section, the costs of the new stretches of the Dublin to Waterford road are likely to exceed €1 billion.
The projected toll road is expected to go to tender early next year and the construction contract is to be one of the NRA's new-style "design and build" contracts.
Some 479 hectares, almost 1,200 acres, are to be acquired by Kildare County Council for the northern section, the council will announce this morning. Land costs, which are included in the €488 million estimate, are subject to the State's agreement with the IFA and will include money for severance, "new for old" farm buildings and goodwill payments.
Critics including the Campaign for Sensible Transport have claimed the road capacity is "over designed" but Kildare council maintains the N9, a single carriageway with significant variation in widths, is inadequate to cater for growth.