Phoenix: The aftermath and the race ahead
The Local and European Election posters may be gone now but the pundits are already speculating that a General Election could be on the cards for as soon as October. Photo: Joe Evans
The local elections have come and gone. We are now inexorably facing the run in to the next general election.
The pundits are convinced that will happen late October or early November.
Budget announced, finance act passed, feel good factor and we’re off.
Why wait until Christmas and a new year that may bring who knows what?
Sinn Féin is on the back foot and the coalition members are happy with that and their own respectable local election performances.
Still, extrapolating from a low turn-out, local, personality-driven election to a national issues full-on general election is a dangerous gamble.
Although the arguments about funding and development of SETU and UHW may be arcane with a daunting level of detail, Waterford people clearly understand the airport case. We are being badly and unfairly treated. The local Green Party vote confirmed that.
Jody Power was honest enough to say that the Airport issue was mentioned on every doorstep. Eamon Ryan, Minister for Transport, came here a month ago with his hands hanging.
He could have saved his councillors and local reps. He didn’t.
Grace O’Sullivan’s MEP seat was disgracefully thrown to the wolves and there is a profound sense that Marc O Cathasaigh TD will suffer the same fate. An avoidable political disaster brought on the Waterford Greens by Eamon Ryan.
Eamon Ryan wants Waterford Airport dead. Those saying civil servants are correctly picky or local promoters delayed in submitting required information, as Mary Butler TD and Minister of State did on local radio recently, and others have tried to do, are talking shite.
When a minister wants to block something, this is what happens. They send the fool further; get us last year’s figures, the price of dilisk on Ballybricken, this year’s estimates of cloud cover, the tide levels in Tramore, or the weather forecast for Iceland for the period 1898/9.
It’s classic and indefensible.
Also remember, we have a coalition government. All parties Greens, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are jointly and severally guilty for killing our airport. They are jointly culpable.
Think of this when next you have to vote. Those in Fine Gael who are smugly braying as being the largest party on our council and Fianna Fáil whose seats have declined from seven to five on council. They bear responsibility for this.
The site is there, the plan is there, the economic benefits are there and have been acknowledged, the required private funding is there, support from all the local authorities in the region is there and still the ministerial cyclist won’t budge.
It was Flann O’Brien who wrote about the osmosis between a man and his bicycle. Minister Ryan’s head has changed by osmosis into dense metal. He and his Dublin Greens want to curtail aviation, in our case, by trampling on the small people.
While Fine Gael (24%, down 1%) are smug with their results in council, Independents (29%) are looming in the background for all parties. Sinn Fein (21%) see their Waterford results as bucking the national trend, Fianna Fáil has gone from seven down to five Council seats locally. Their percentage of first preference votes (down nearly 4%) in the constituency was at 15%, compared to a national 23%.
Questions will be asked about the performance of Minister of State Mary Butler. In conservative rural West Waterford they lost a seat they had held for 50 years. It’s no surprise to anyone.
If that percentage transfers to the general election, Fianna Fáil may lose their seat. Anyone can follow the failure to deliver.
Capital spending has been grotesquely skewed against UHW over the past four/five years at a time when money was freely available. We have announcements to beat the band about 24/7 but no delivery.
It's six months since we were told that an extension to the pathology lab at UHW, with full planning for years, was ready to go with a builder's hut on site. Half a year later, nothing!
A hub for children to be built at St Otteran’s is 10 years in the HSE Capital Plan and has not moved.
Ms Butler’s priority AMHU psychiatric unit at UHW is at appraisal stage for so long that there is hair growing on the file.
A vertical extension to the Out Patients Unit was ready to go in February 2022 with a Covid derogation. Now we hear it is at the appraisal stage. It has full planning for years and not moved an inch.
What is Ms Butler doing? Does she, in her political innocence, believe that €20 million committed to UHW projects is a huge sum?
In reality our Model 4 hospital, one of only nine such hospitals in the country, needs €200 million to come up to scratch.
In the four years 2020/2023, more capital expenditure went to the Model 3 St Luke’s Hospital in Kilkenny and Mercy (Cork) and the Model 2 Hospital in Mallow than to UHW.
CUH capital expenditure was €86 million in the four years, while UHW was €32 million.
This disparity is replicated all over the place.
We had to tolerate a tent outside UHW for nine months in 2023 until Fianna Fáil’s Michael McGrath got wind of it and personally issued an instruction to have it removed.
Ireland has had a capital spending spree over the nearly five years of this government without a major project at UHW.
A second cath lab, an ophthalmology theatre and two prefabs pretending to be modular buildings outside the Emergency Department are welcome but a poor overall return.
People keep mentioning the Dunmore Wing even though that was completed five years ago. It’s rather like Taoiseach Mr. Harris mentioning our “new” courthouse, our “new” fire station and our “new” flood relief scheme as instances of his government’s good intentions.
All were completed years ago.
Fine Gael is already counting its General Election chickens in this constituency, but the race is won in the last furlong as Sinn Féin are now discovering and not in the first mile.
If the long-promised new engineering building at SETU and significant work at UHW have not started before the next general election, then there will an electoral price to be paid. The Green Party has had a costly lesson affirming the saying that “all politics are local”. Let’s see if Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are slow learners.
