The National Roads Authority (NRA) wants to farm out maintenance of the dual carriageway network to specialised contractors, a move that would shift responsibility for the €200 million annual upkeep of the system from local authorities.
As motorists prepare for bank holiday congestion on the roads this weekend, the head of the public body in charge of the network said piecemeal maintenance by local authorities was "completely inefficient".
NRA chief Fred Barry said multi-billion-euro road investment planned for the years to 2015 in the Transport 21 scheme will bring the replacement value of the overall system to some €50 billion. The priority will shift to maintenance of the system, he said. It would be foolish to make such expenditure and then allow the system to deteriorate.
Mr Barry said the expansion of the network would bring annual maintenance costs to €400 million by 2015 - double the current expenditure - and also said the operation of electronic traffic management systems would cost another €100 million a year.
Maintenance could be carried out by public or private contractors or both, but the NRA wants a rolling programme of specialised maintenance agreed years in advance of the work itself.
"We have to manage it as a national network," Mr Barry said. "I don't think we can do that on a piecemeal basis with 32 local authorities . . . I want it tightened up. I want to ensure that we're doing the most efficient thing.
"I think it's okay for what we're doing at the moment but I don't think we can take the same approach to a completed dual carriageway network . . . The probable decision is that certainly the high quality dual carriageway network should be treated differently certainly to the national secondary network."
Mr Barry said the development of a new system of maintenance would have to be agreed with the Departments of Environment, Transport and Finance. He was open to discussion on how the role of public and private bodies would be organised, but he wanted to formulate a system in which all work that needed to be done was carried out "and not more".
Asked what immediate priorities he would set before any incoming minister for transport if Martin Cullen was moved from that post, he said he would ask that the Government decide soon whether to proceed with two big projects that fall outside Transport 21: an outer-orbital route around Dublin, taking in big towns in the commuter belt; and an eastern bypass of the city.
"Let's not spend another 10 years talking about it," he added.