Phoenix: Regional development - is Waterford benefitting or getting crumbs?
25 out of the 27 new gardaí assigned to Waterford will be stationed at Waterford Garda Station in Ballybricken. Photo: Joe Evans
It is a certainty that everyone will welcome the recent appointment of 27 new members of the Garda to Waterford. What struck me last year, while in the Garda public office on Ballybricken was just how very small the 50 year old station appears. The public office is no bigger than a normal, domestic living room and certainly on the day I was there, looked sad and overused. The nearby old Labour Exchange has been pressed into overflow use, but where will 27 new Gardaí be accommodated? I suggest to anyone interested that they should search the web for photos of Ireland’s new Garda stations. The huge new Galway Garda station and north-west regional HQ in Renmore is particularly impressive and instructive. Ballybricken looks by comparison, like a small country station rather than in one of Ireland’s principal cities. Waterford’s Garda force deserves proper, modern accommodation. What plans are there to provide this? Regional policy works for Galway. It doesn’t do the same for us. Indeed, regional policy seems to work everywhere in Ireland except in the south east.
Apparently, the HQ for the Eastern Garda Region of which the Waterford/Kilkenny division is a part, is since 2019, in Wexford town, population 21,000. A large new station building has been erected there adjacent to the local courthouse. It’s hard to understand why this should be so, regardless of the attendant announcement. Suffice it to say that the Eastern Garda Region is the only one where the regional office and staff are not in the main population centre. What impact does that have on national perspectives? How does that conform or comply with the aims of Ireland’s National Plan?
The Phil Hogan dictum, enunciated some years ago, “Waterford must learn to share” is all around us. When it comes to national policy supposedly selecting Waterford city for growth as the regional economic driver, one must ask just what exactly will do the driving? The whole scenario is just further evidence of Fine Gael’s destructive antipathy to Waterford since coming to power in 2011. It follows the closure of two VEC HQs (city and county) in Waterford and the transfer of staff to Wexford. Prefabs on the grounds of Waterford College of Further Education in Parnell Street for over twenty years, speak of political priorities and development postponed. The lacklustre performance of the IDA in locating FDI jobs in Waterford (these jobs generally emerge where companies are shown and nudged by political interests) is another element in the overall scheme of things. The lack of an IDA strategic site here and a pivot away from Waterford as the preferred regional centre for new industry indicates an unannounced government policy.
Presumably, the creation of a Wexford Campus of SETU follows that same logic. Similarly the development of (obviously necessary) multi-storey car park and ward block at Wexford General Hospital and the massive development of St Luke’s Hospital Kilkenny, both Model 3 hospitals, while UHW the regional, tertiary referral, Model 4 hospital is marooned in a car parking hell, nationally unacknowledged bed and resource shortage, tells the same story. The published National Treatment Purchase Fund waiting lists figures for UHW versus all other HSE hospitals provide a clearer comparative picture of what’s going, or rather, not going on. Meanwhile, government signing the €1.86 billion contract (SISK) for Dublin’s new National Maternity Hospital while vital Waterford HSE projects wither, ruthlessly exposes the performance of Minister Mary Butler.
This is the development of Ireland a la carte. Regardless of whatever a National Plan says, it’s whatever political influence demands. Who was it said that no military plan survives its first contact with the enemy or in political terms, no plan survives meeting with a new minister? Quite obviously, post 2011, Waterford has paid a heavy price for portraying our city as the regional capital. The sense of being pushed aside to facilitate other, politically stronger areas is quite palpable. Maybe the Carlow/Kilkenny/Wexford FG axis elects more demanding politicians than we do? If so, then we deserve what we get. All choices, as the French dramatist Corneille said, come at a cost. We elected first one and then two SF TDs. To what end? We are paying for that choice.
For 20 years, not a single new WIT building was erected while six new buildings went up on the Carlow IT campus. Fine Gael did that to our college. The new SETU engineering building under construction on the Cork Road is an analgesic, long overdue, investment crumb. If you don’t accept that description then go to Maynooth or UL to see how colleges which were approximately the same size as WIT earlier this century, have developed and doubled student numbers. We have been shamefully treated and like idiots accepted the evisceration without allocating political responsibility or demanding accountability. We’ve gone from having a locally based and managed, vibrant, highly successful, competitive, internationally recognised third level institution, proudly bearing the name of this city, to being (despite the protestations of Prof Campbell and the Department of Further Education) a largely anonymous piece of a wider organisation. We have been erased.
The current socio-economic cost is frighteningly visible in the incredible fact that there is not a single Waterford project currently at the planning permission or tender stage across the vital Acute Medicine, Community Medicine, port, airport, rail, road, third level education or FDI industries, metrics. The less politically savvy highlight the North Quays as evidence of government’s good faith, but considering the monies available and spent elsewhere, its impact on the local economy is minimal. Planned and promised new buildings for SETU in pharmacy and veterinary medicine have not appeared, while long promised vital new bed block, outpatient department etc at UHW have vanished into the ether.
The abysmal lack of government support for Waterford Airport, even when its development might economically help this area, sent a message from Mícheál and Simon which we failed to grasp viz: only lip-service shall be paid to the idea of the south east as an identifiable region with a nominated regional capital. Government investment is spread across the area like margarine, to that political end. Ministers John Cummins and Mary Butler will explain it to you.
