Phoenix: Ministerial blather!

On February 29 last, Minister Paschal Donohoe said: "I think Waterford is making extraordinary progress. I also know we all need to do far more. We need to continue with the progress in UHW. We need to accelerate our efforts to make the Technological University of the South East a reality, and to fulfil all the potential that it can offer to Waterford and the region. We're making progress, but we're all hungry and ambitious to do even more."

Fine Gael rushed to promise Waterford a university before election 2011 after the Glass and the Talk Talk closures. Their election manifesto pledged the Universities Act would be amended to allow Institutes of Technology apply for university status. Two Fine Gael TDs were then elected here in 2011. 

What happened? The PPP for new WIT business and engineering schools was cancelled. The shite was kicked out of WIT’s aspirations. Six years later Fine Gael pledged another PPP for a new engineering building on a site prepared in 2008 at a cost of €2.9 million. Planning permission was obtained in 2019, but in 2020 the Waterford development was dropped in favour of those in Dublin, Cork and Sligo. 

Eventually WIT and Carlow IT were forced together to form SETU in 2021. On October 18, 2022, this paper reported: “The application for funding for the Engineering building has gone in. SETU President Campbell has received a letter from the HEA outlining that the Engineering building is expected to commence next year (2023) when the financial side of the contract is finalised." 

“I’m optimistic that will start on site next year,” she said. “But we need more than that. I’m estimating at least €250 million worth of capital infrastructure is needed in SETU.” 

What have we seen since then? The €3 million purchase of the brownfield old glass factory site? Not another cent of capital spending in teaching facilities at WIT/ SETU has been made.

Minister Donohoe was interviewed by Damien Tiernan last Thursday and confirmed Minister for Further Education Patrick O’Donovan’s announcement that 40 places in a new pharmacy degree will be rolled out in SETU Waterford. 

When combined with the recent announcement of veterinary medicine for SETU in Kildalton, this is extremely positive. These are high profile courses. 

The €130 million operational fund announced will be spread across six universities (including SETU) and mostly covers annual recurring costs.

Waterford readers must understand that our central problem has been the grotesque inability of WIT/SETU to attract major capital spending from Fine Gael-led governments. In the past 10 years Carlow IT/ SETU has built five new buildings. WIT has built nothing since 2006. Every former Institute of Technology (now Technological Universities) from Kerry to Blanchardstown to Sligo that one can think of has built new buildings. 

Every existing university has new buildings, WIT built none. This is the running sore of unfairness and inequality in capital spending that Fine Gael must attend to as it causes desperately unfair comparisons between facilities in Waterford versus other areas. 

Remember the Frisby development on the Cork Road is that company’s private money. Under trenchant questioning by Damien Tiernan, Minister Donohoe disgracefully skipped over the fact that the PPP for the proposed new engineering building has still not commenced by suggesting that all our universities have similar problems. He was economical, at best, with the truth, as if each of them, like WIT, had built nothing in the past 15 years. His answers were mendacious, political, slippery blather, indicating that this government has no intention of delivering the capital investment promised in 2017 when the engineering building was announced. 

Remember, they, Fine Gael, Simon Harris et al, stopped it going ahead in 2020!

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told us “Waterford will not be forgotten”, Taoiseach Simon Harris “Wants to get the job done for Waterford”. Minister Paschal Donohoe says “We need to accelerate our efforts”, yet the investment has still not arrived. 

Fianna Fáil for its part has delivered the North Quays funding. The new surgical hub construction is underway, combined with increases in UHW staff and budget, albeit 24/7 cardiology is still not in place. The dismissal by Fianna Fáil Minister James Lawless of the Waterford Airport business case as a “pig in a poke” was disgraceful and exposed embedded, negative government and civil service attitudes to Waterford. It plays into the cultist agenda of the ex-Green Party leader Eamon Ryan. The Greens may have distributed Sports funding and various local transport initiatives, but have almost destroyed our faith in representative democracy.

How does the record of Fine Gael ministers in government stack up (other than the SETU announcements)? Simon Coveney, Fine Gael Minister for Enterprise, when asked last March about IDA projects in Waterford said: "In 2023 there were 243 new IDA investments nationwide (one in Waterford). We need to make sure that Waterford City and County has its fair share of that investment. There are huge opportunities for Waterford in offshore wind, not just in terms of building the infrastructure and assembling it, but also servicing it.” 

Very funny hot wind indeed, when one considers the recent government announcement of €88.5 million wind energy support facilities in Ringaskiddy in Cork Port, which followed a €38 million container terminal investment there in July! 

Meanwhile, zero for Waterford Port! 

What has Minister for Enterprise Fine Gael’s Peter Burke done for Waterford since Cartamundi closed? Made nice speeches? Maybe he “will never forget us” or “get the job done for Waterford” and will “accelerate our efforts”?

As one of Ireland’s five “strategic” cities, Waterford’s economic future health is intrinsically linked with the delivery of state investment under the National Planning Framework for Ireland 2040, especially in acute medicine, third-level facilities and FDI. Equity of treatment is a presumed cornerstone of our democracy, but is Waterford treated like Galway, which has some 50/60 medical devices industries? 

Or like Limerick with a 400-job announcement for Verizon last December and a €1 billion Eli Lilly plant recently announced? 

Or like UL or UCG in those cities which have seen exponential growth in student numbers, accommodation and courses over the past two decades, while WIT/SETU was all but strangled? 

The SETU announcements are positive, but without capital spending on new infrastructure and permission to borrow and develop student accommodation like traditional universities, we still lag behind our peers.