Phoenix: Runaround Mary!

While Micheál Martin visibly preened last week over work commencing on a €93 million refurbishment of Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery, Waterford was told that the Waterford/Wexford Rail reopening, highlighted in the 2024 Rail Review, was dropped from the National Plan. 

Nobody would care if the Crawford job cost €930m, if a fair share was coming our way, but it most definitely is not! 

The Crawford Gallery was apparently designated by Micheál Martin as a national cultural institution in 2006. It doesn’t charge an admission fee. Not a cent has come the way of Waterford’s museums or galleries. They charge for admission to maintain our historic patrimony and are financially supported by the admirable civic largesse of private individuals, like Noel and Stephanie Frisby, David Bowles and Coleman Curran. The latter two are Dubliners mind you, prepared to step up when our own government fails us.

This is the penultimate column of 2025. It’s usual at this time for the column to reflect on the past year’s political and economic performance and ask, how is our city doing? To answer that, while you read this in a quiet moment over Christmas week, ask yourself if it is almost beyond question that our senior political representative, Minister Mary Butler, is failing her own constituency? 

A record IDA year with 323 job announcements, 183 of those in the regions. Only one, from IBM, in Waterford! South East Economic Monitor (SEEM) Report 2025: “Within the region, IDA job growth has been uneven: Carlow and Wexford remain static; Kilkenny has seen a significant uplift and Waterford has declined.” 

This appalling performance, satisfaction with the half car and the single candidacy at election times, cannot continue into 2026 without local Fianna Fáil calling her to order. This is abject surrender on a grand scale, never ask, never question, never demand, just pathetic acceptance of crumbs. It’s disgraceful. 

Even the normally staid, suited members of Waterford Chamber, business people with an eye on the local economy, have begun to grumble.

Micheál Martin has been a disaster for Waterford. He has shown that in spades. Given his deserved tribulations over the Jim Gavin debacle, his usual Cork hubris, the sooner he is gone as Taoiseach, following Coveney and McGrath and taking Ms Butler with him, the better. We might get a fairer country. 

Ms Butler is too close to him for Waterford’s sake and will surely pay the price under any new Fianna Fáil regime, whenever it emerges. We had the same problem with Fine Gael‘s Enda Kenny in 2011. His government slashed and burned UHW and WIT, closed two VECs and left Waterford as the only city in the country without an ETB HQ! 

The sooner we get a Dublin Taoiseach, the better. At least they tend to be even-handed. 

Bertie Ahern showed he understood local angst over the status of this city, but we now have a dire situation with Ms Butler, close to power as chief whip, but cannot influence that power for her own constituency. 

Martin Cullen was offered the chief whip position by Bertie Ahern in 2002 and refused it precisely because it was powerless. Mr Martin, well knowing Waterford’s needs and desire for a cabinet ministry, with Ms Butler as firm favourite to be Minister for Children, neutered her and Waterford by making her a peripatetic messenger as chief whip, running around for every dog and devil, while ignoring her own constituency requirements. He gave her a poisoned chalice.

Ms Butler couldn’t secure a paltry €12 million for a joint venture at Waterford Airport despite assuring us pre-2024 election that a new Minister for Transport would sort the project for us. Now, with Fianna Fáil minister Darragh O’Brien in that position, Waterford cannot get airport funding, or rail funding for the Wexford line. Waterford will be the only city not to have a twin rail track to Dublin. 

We cannot get a cent for Port of Waterford, despite the port working at full capacity and having a business case with the Dept. of Transport for the past two years! 

Ms Butler has also singularly failed to ensure that 24/7 cardiology, promised by the Taoiseach eight years ago outside UHW and by the Minister for Health last April, is in place. Vacuous statements about “the coming months” are inexcusable. 

Ms Butler should have insisted that a vital, UHW Vertical Out Patients Department (now cancelled), on the stocks in 2022, was built under a Covid Derogation without planning permission, but instead accepted two modular tin prefabs and a tent outside the Emergency Department. 

What other Model 4 hospital was decorated with a Médecins Sans Frontières tent outside its ED in freezing weather? Was there one in CUH, St Vincent’s in Dublin, or even the perpetually under siege Limerick UH?

The message to Waterford voters that we are not getting a fair crack of the whip is gaining traction. Insulting our historic city by allowing Dundalk rename its Institute of Technology as “Dundalk University College”, while the name Waterford was gleefully erased from WIT to form SETU, by political fiat from Simon Harris for the benefit of Carlow/Kilkenny/Wexford? 

Greenlighting a new SETU engineering building and two new courses in Waterford, after 17 years waiting for investment, hardly cuts the mustard. The North Quays, SETU engineering block and UHW surgical hub are all from the last government. 

The surgical hub was devised by senior civil servants without recourse to the HSE (they would have ruined it!). 

Announcements of SETU projects being “progressed” to the planning rather than the construction phase, or not having any UHW projects at all at the planning stage, confirm the bias explicitly detailed in the SEEM report. 

“The South East, despite marquee projects like the North Quays, has the lowest per capita investment at €1,738 - around €7,000 below the national average - reflecting a persistent pattern of regional underinvestment.” 

Those figures have not been challenged or rebutted at any time by local Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, because our politicians know that when they are explaining, or not, they are losing.

And by the way, local chatter already has it that Sinn Féin will never see two seats again in this constituency, such is the level of general political disaffection! A plague on all their houses?