Phoenix: An exercise in Apartheid

The long saga of pensions for those who worked in Waterford Crystal continues. 

The closure of the Kilbarry plant in 2008, compounded by the financial crash of that year, plunged this city, not for the first time, into an economic crisis. 

The local economy tanked. 

The fallout is still visible in the investment deficit in the city. That deficit is only slowly being tackled and it hurt our small city badly. 

The North Quays, while welcome, only begins the resolution process. This is a lovely city in a lovely area with bags of potential, yet that potential is degraded by politics. 

Brian Hayes and Enda Kenny of Fine Gael knew the obvious solution and quickly proposed that Waterford needed a university to transform its fortunes. They saw what had happened with Limerick and knew such key intervention would have a powerful and dynamic local and regional impact. 

Galway and Limerick have shown that business follows the state’s lead investment.

University designation has long been sought but was opposed by existing providers in Cork and Dublin and indeed in Carlow/Wexford and Kilkenny. Regional politics is a potent toxin, even when the common good is obvious. 

A proper university would immediately generate a medical school in Waterford, just as UL did in Limerick. This would immediately allow the South East to function as its own regional health authority under Sláintecare, without being tied to St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin via a ridiculous east coast leg. 

It would have helped UHW and other hospitals in the South East attract medical staff and consultants. 

It would have given the entire region a lift. 

SETU has decided in its strategic plan that such a facility is not for it, despite the fact that UHW has all the facilities necessary to support such a school. 

Even the SETU nursing school is constrained by government policy in the allocation of nursing student places. Why is that? 

How can a new university set out on its first steps when it is constrained by state policy? Can SETU even borrow like existing universities or has it a professorial staff organisation like they do? 

Why have we one arm tied behind our back before we even begin to compete?

In any event, Fine Gael was elected in 2011. Instead of delivering the promised “proper” university, the government embarked on a diametrically opposed process of absolute evisceration of WIT. 

WIT saw no investment, no expansion, no new buildings, no new courses. The proposed new Engineering Building and Business Schools, which were part of a 2009 PPP on a site prepared at a cost of €2.9 million were cancelled, while university buildings in other parts of the country went ahead. 

All expansion stopped at WIT and across the city UHW was threatened with severe downgrading. 

Not a stick or a stone on the form of new teaching buildings has been added to WIT since then. 

The last teaching building completed at WIT, Humanities on the Cork Road, commenced in 1998, stalled for some years and was completed in 2006. We’ve had 26 years of lost development. 

Is it any wonder that local business confidence was shot or that city nightlife, which hugely depends on student activity, was crippled? 

Fine Gael promised the solution to the long-term economic development problems of Waterford city and then reneged. 

Sure it was only an election promise wasn’t it, and isn’t that what one does before elections?

We have discovered that the characteristic, which most defines Waterford, is resilience, because without that ingredient, our city would have vanished down the plughole. 

If normal people moan about things it is because we are not stupid. We can see the deficits. 

Someone should tell Mr. Harris that we do travel, you know. 

We have the least resourced and staffed Model 4 Hospital of nine such facilities in the country. How can that be fair? 

It seems almost impossible for Waterford to get real government funding to develop infrastructure in the medical or third level space. Why? 

It’s very hard to listen to Taoiseach Harris boasting in a recent Dáil debate that his government has increased staff and budget at UHW over the past four years when the comparative analysis shows UHW is still the most underfunded, understaffed and underresourced Model 4 hospital in the country. 

Expansion at UHW has been in lock step with every other hospital in the land. No exceptionalism acknowledging that UHW was starting from a lower level is visible.

It had been hoped in the local elections that Mr. Harris might give the go ahead for the new WIT/SETU engineering building to boost his local troops, but no. 

He says he is committed to it. But they all say that don’t they? 

The Taoiseach told the Dáil that Fine Gael has delivered the “university” to Waterford. Such glib commentary is unacceptable given the lack of financial support for SETU Waterford. 

All this came to mind when reading a press release from Minister for Further Education, Patrick O’Donovan. He announced the completion of an €18 million 4,000sqm extension to the EO1 Building in ATU Sligo to deliver cutting-edge teaching and research facilities, a €17 million refurbishment of Blocks K and L in ATU Sligo to offer improved facilities to the Faculty of Engineering and Design, as well as the Yeats Academy of Arts Design and Architecture, and a €2 million delivery of a new building in Sligo College of Further Education to deliver enhanced learning in IT, Health, Care, Business, Law and Engineering for 500 students. 

Meanwhile, nothing has been built at WIT/SETU. Far be it from me to begrudge investment in Sligo town, but questions re Fine Gael and Waterford city abound.

The Taoiseach Mr. Harris did nothing for Waterford while Minister for Health… giving the go ahead for a second cath lab and then delaying it for years. 

He did nothing for Waterford while in Further Education, except delay our PPP. 

What makes anyone think he will have a late conversion to our cause and do something for us as Taoiseach? 

We keep falling for the same auld stuff recently regurgitated by Mr. Harris in the Dáil. “We built the flood defences, the court house, the fire station...”! So what? Where is the SETU investment?