When/why was this stretch of Ireland's N22 realigned to identical standards?

[RJDG14]

I was exploring roads in Ireland on Google Earth and came across this area where a roughly 1km stretch of the N22 looks to have been realigned to slightly smooth out a bend, near some hamlet or locality called Cummeenavrick:

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.9790189 ... ?entry=ttu

What I found unusual about this would be that the previous road looked, other than having a slightly sharper bend, to have been built to an identical Irish WS2 standard with hard shoulders. Does anyone here know when this realignment occured (I couldn't find any details following a quick search) and why it occured. It's possible that the previous alignment had been an accident spot, although they might as well have built it on its current alignment (which looks to contain a cutting) when they first widened this stretch, which I'd imagine occured sometime between the 1980s and early 2000s. The newer alignment also looks to have made this section of the road around 200m shorter, which would probably cut journey times by a few seconds.

The road was definitely realigned sometime before 2011, which is when Google Earth's non-cloudy aerial imagery goes back to in this location. NASA's low resolution satellite imagery on Google Earth suggests that it may have been realigned sometime during the late 1990s or early 2000s.

[Ross Spur]

There are some notices in The Kerryman for the area:

11 December 1998: Tender Invite re overlaying macadam / asphalt at Derryreag / Cummeenavrick
21 January 2000: Extinguishment of Public Rights of Way in Cummeenavrick Notice - 2 sections of N22 of 120 metres (easterly direction) and 150 metres (northerly direction) re the original Order of 14 December 1998.

Looks like the latter could be the stopping up of the ends of the old road.

[MotorwayGuy]

The most likely reason is this bend had a bad accident record and realigning it was seen as the best solution. In the UK we would probably have slapped a 50mph limit on it and used loads of red hatchings and yellow signs instead.

[RJDG14]

There are some notices in The Kerryman for the area:

11 December 1998: Tender Invite re overlaying macadam / asphalt at Derryreag / Cummeenavrick
21 January 2000: Extinguishment of Public Rights of Way in Cummeenavrick Notice - 2 sections of N22 of 120 metres (easterly direction) and 150 metres (northerly direction) re the original Order of 14 December 1998.

Looks like the latter could be the stopping up of the ends of the old road.

This date (1998-2000) pretty much matches NASA's historic low resolution imagery. It would be interesting to know if there's any information on when the old road at Cummeenavrick was originally upgraded to WS2. I think such roads were rare in the ROI prior to the 1980s when they began to receive funding to do so. The historic 2001 aerial imagery on the OSI viewer shows the old road to have been in a very similar state then to in the early 2010s, while it shows it as the main road with a WS2 standard in 1995. According to the 1995 imagery, they were in the process of upgrading the road to WS2 just to the east of the Cummeenavrick section at the time, while to the west the road went from WS2 to narrow S2 at Tulligmore (this section had also been upgraded by 2001 to its present standard). The fact that most of the old road to the west and east was not WS2 while this now bypassed stretch at Cummeenavrick was makes me wonder whether the old WS2 road there was intended as a temporary measure to improve a particularly bad stretch of the previous road prior to the full upgrade of the road to WS2 (when it was realigned).

The markings on the old road were still clearly visible in some 2013 aerial imagery (and on some old 2011 Street View imagery) and it looks to have been a virtually identical standard to the current road, so why was the decision made to realign it?

[RJDG14]

The most likely reason is this bend had a bad accident record and realigning it was seen as the best solution. In the UK we would probably have slapped a 50mph limit on it and used loads of red hatchings and yellow signs instead.

Great Britain seems to have virtually no single carriageway roads with hard shoulders (and very few non-motorway dual carriageways with them either) unlike the ROI, which has lots of them. Newer Northern Irish roads typically don't have them, but some of the all purpose Northern Irish roads built in the 1960s and early 1970s do. Ireland's roads were traditionally of a poor standard compared with Great Britain, but since the 1970s a lot of their roads have received significant upgrades while most roads in England (aside from newly built ones) remain virtually identical to then aside from additional safety markings/signage.

[Bryn666]

The new road appears to be S2+1, that implies it is going up a hill and the realignment appears to take it along a shallower line avoiding the sharp bend which will have been historically following contours.

Smoother alignments on hills are better for HGVs, as they really could do without slowing down for a bend whilst already losing most forward momentum on the hill to begin with.

[RJDG14]

The new road appears to be S2+1, that implies it is going up a hill and the realignment appears to take it along a shallower line avoiding the sharp bend which will have been historically following contours.

Smoother alignments on hills are better for HGVs, as they really could do without slowing down for a bend whilst already losing most forward momentum on the hill to begin with.

I've only just noticed that. Even then the old road was an identical width and they could have probably made the change retrospectively via a simple repaint job.

[freebrickproductions]

The new road appears to be S2+1, that implies it is going up a hill and the realignment appears to take it along a shallower line avoiding the sharp bend which will have been historically following contours.

Smoother alignments on hills are better for HGVs, as they really could do without slowing down for a bend whilst already losing most forward momentum on the hill to begin with.

I've only just noticed that. Even then the old road was an identical width and they could have probably made the change retrospectively via a simple repaint job.

Looking at street view imagery captured along the old alignment, it appears that it was already an S2+1 as well:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.9795539 ... ?entry=ttu

I will say, the section that is now a farm field is definitely a bit amusing to look at!