Being ridiculed?

The trials and tribulations of Waterford Airport reached a high point recently when Waterford City and County Council decided that its FF mayor Jason Murphy should write a letter to his party colleague and government chief whip, Minister Mary Butler, asking her to arrange a meeting for a council deputation with an FF minister for Transport, Darragh O’Brien. 

This is politics as high farce. It is stick a finger in your eye time and is shockingly offensive to the council and people of this city. We are being treated like shite. 

As the wits on Ballybricken say, you couldn’t make it up! Ms Butler should have been out in front of this immediately. The price for being shafted by Micheál Martin for the job as Minister for Children and fobbed off with the chief whip post is clearly evident.

Last week came the welcome announcement from on high that 24/7 cardiology will be provided in UHW. €600k was allotted for that purpose. The recent National Review of Cardiology was again “steered” and carried the lie, perpetuated since at least 2014 and disproven then, that UHW had not provided fgures for cardiology procedures. 

The report did not recommend 24/7 PPCI for UHW. The decision to deliver that service happened because the National Office of Clinical Audit (NOCA) figures showed the reality. UHW numbers challenge some of the existing 24/7 providers. The Minister for Health had no real option, but she made the right decision. 

We have burst a gut for ten years seeking responsible medical equity, while devious forces in high places in government blocked 24/7 at every turn, for relative peanuts, for €600k. For comparison, Ireland’s Central Bank paid €616,000 for a sculpture at its new headquarters at Dublin’s North Wall Quay in 2022. 

The Double Rainbow piece by London based artist Eva Rothschild was expected to cost €300,000. Dublin City Council was told that the sculpture would be “monumental” and placed in a location where “a really strong and lasting engagement with the public is possible”. It’s a collection of bent, skinny tubes, like a child’s attempt to erect a tent frame. 

If the material cost €1k I’d be surprised. It represents emphatically that yawning disconnect between Dublin policy/projects and most of the rest of the country. Certainly this end of the world anyway! Children’s Hospital, Metro North, bike shelters, security huts, skinny sculptures, take your pick.

The point to be made about our airport and everything else around the place is that the good in government delivery is continually undermined by soul-destroying delay. Projects are always a day late and a dollar short and when they are eventually attained by resilience, determination and having the whole local political, business and social community exercised about it; it comes almost like a throwaway afterthought. 

Here, have it! For 20 years, nothing new has been built at WIT on the Cork Road. During that time, whole new academic cities have been built on third level campuses around the country. Don’t tell me that the parents of Waterford who bring their kids to open days in Cork, Limerick and Galway don’t see the difference. 

We have stood idly by while arguably the best Institute of Technology in the country was kneecapped by Fine Gael. The undermining of WIT since 2011 has been grotesque. 

While five major new buildings were erected at Carlow IT in the past decade, WIT was throttled. The dead hand of Wexford/Carlow/Kilkenny FG political influence prevailed. 

A new engineering building for the Cork Road campus, first mooted in 2006, cancelled by FG in 2011, reaffirmed in 2017, dragged through the bushes since then and supposedly signed off by government in Dec 2024, has still failed to start. Why? Does the delay in purchasing a site for a Wexford SETU campus means that nothing in SETU Waterford can proceed?

If you say mention this unconscionable delay, you are branded as a whinger or complainer. Then the magic incantation abrakedabra, zimzala boomba, borageisha moolah is uttered by our political masters…The North Quays! Truly a great and welcome project to remediate an ugly brownfield site, but it’s not the zenith of our ambitions in education and medicine or FDI. 

The extent to which future Foreign Direct Investment will be damaged by the carry on in Washington is unclear, but Waterford city has self-evidently not benefited from recent FDI to anything like Limerick or Galway in the past fifteen years. The final, draft, revised, National Planning Framework says (again): 'The cities of Limerick, Galway and Waterford are also important drivers of national growth and key regional centres. 

All have international visibility to some extent and require greater scale. As part of the National Planning Framework strategy to accelerate the development of and strengthen these Cities, all three should also plan to grow by over 40% to 2040'. The biggest driver of regional development is state investment. 

This is clearly shown in Galway where an investment tsunami has driven the population of that city to 85000. The diversion of a large medical devices industry in recent years to another part of the south east because of the lack of a strategic IDA site in Waterford, is really instructive. 

Government literature theoretically supports Waterford, but government action for Waterford is determined by politics. The government acts like Saint Augustine who wrote, “let me be good oh Lord, but not yet.” The North Quays was the easy bit, once off and repeated elsewhere in various forms. 

Airport, port, third level education, acute medicine, FDI all require political decisions which impinge on other agendas. Despite the extension to the pathology lab and the construction of a new surgical hub at UHW, there is hardly one project there prepped for immediate construction. 

Apparently the proposed Vertical Out Patients Department has been sidelined even though it has planning permission since May 2022. The SETU engineering building saga on the Cork Road shames us all and especially our government representatives.

It graphically illustrates the failure of the local political, business and social community to understand the impact of improved third level facilities on the future health of this city. Meanwhile, not a peep from Fine Gael or Fianna Fail. Our future is being stolen.