Phoenix: The map says it all!

The government, which refused to sanction €12 million for a joint venture to develop a new runway at Waterford Airport, has just paid €11 million to buy land at Celbridge, Co. Kildare, to give access to the 18th-century Castletown House. This shows you what they think of us and our aspirations for international connectivity. 

A business plan from Port of Waterford (operating at capacity) for a modest development at Belview to extend berthage space has been with government for two years, with zero success. Meanwhile, a €250 million terminal has opened in Rosslare and €100 million extension is underway at Ringaskiddy. We are being commercially and strategically undermined by a Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael government.

Last week, salt tears were wept at the departure of Minister Paschal Donohoe, a long-term obstructer of the development of SETU, Waterford. Goodbye and good riddance. He follows that long line of government ministers who made a virtue of stymying Waterford aspirations, Coveney, McGrath, Varadkar etc. 

Just read the South East Economic Monitor (SEEM) report, which is banned reading for all members of FG and FF, lest it open their eyes. 

Donohoe will soon be followed by Micheál Martin, the Cork Taoiseach, who has since 1998 hindered any real progress at WIT/SETU to protect the hegemony of his beloved UCC. 

Varadkar, of Waterford stock, promised that we would not be forgotten, only to drive away and do precisely that! 

When are we going to learn that we can’t progress by electing people incapable of representing us properly? When are we going to get fed up with the same old, same old, when all we get for our efforts is the same old, same old?

Last week saw Dundalk Institute of Technology, one of the poorest performing IoTs according to HEA stats and media reports, being made into a constituent college of Queen’s University Belfast. Waterford campaigned for almost a century for university status, and was on the cusp of that in 2006. We are now one third of a spancelled Tech Uni, without professorial staff and lacking the ability to undertake corporate borrowing for new infrastructure. 

Some suggest DKIT will need its own board to continue to receive public money, so will institutionally still be totally separate, but I wouldn’t bet on it. 

Waterford deserved its own independent university status, but has instead, courtesy of Fine Gael influence, been lumbered with a regional merger subject to all the inherent political interferences that involves. For heaven’s sake, the president of SETU cannot come to Waterford without having to go to Wexford or Carlow the next day, lest feelings be hurt. It underlines how unfairly WIT was treated, and SETU continues to be treated by Government. 

Green lighting a building stalled for 17 years, and two new courses, is not the game changer the region (particularly its young people) were promised. Almost nothing promised has been delivered.

Dundalk Institute of Technology will become Dundalk University College in 2026 following a landmark partnership with Queen's University, Belfast, according to the president of DKIT, Dr. Diarmuid O’Callaghan. I congratulate DKIT. 

The very thing Waterford asked for, the retention of its name for the new TU, was denied us by Fine Gael and Simon Harris. He climbed the political greasy poll by lobbying the Wexford/Carlow/Kilkenny Fine Gael vote. 

Waterford city and its third level offering were the collateral damage as all course and capital development stopped until the tame, almost Waterford free, college board voted for a merger with Carlow IT. When anyone dared suggest that this might not be in our best interests, they were pooh-poohed by Waterford Fine Gael, senior members of which organisation expressed their severe reservations to this writer at what was happening. 

A shameful injustice has been done and the oldest city in the country has been reduced in status. Every other city in the country has its name on its third level institution. We do not.

While we wait for the Trumpian PR fest from FF and FG that will seek to convince us that Waterford has had a good deal because the North Quays, a new structural hub and a new engineering building are under construction, I just advise our 32-member council to travel to Galway, which only reached city status in 1990 and which was less than half the size of Waterford in our lifetime, and tell me that we are getting a fair crack of the whip by comparison. 

While our TDs accept comparative crumbs thrown at us, Galway has had a 50-year beano of broad spread state-funded capital development. Its political influence has been further strengthened with the promotion of Hildegarde Naughton to Cabinet and the election of Catherine Connolly as president.

The most distressing recent thing though, was the article, and associated map, printed by the prestigious international financial and economic news agency Bloomberg using “IDA sponsored content” entitled “Global Future, Built in Ireland.” The map highlights Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Kildare with a powerful piece on the benefits of setting up business in any of these locations. 

The map has, unwittingly or not, a cloud over the south east of Ireland as if to indicate that “here be demons” or else is a place of no interest to the international community. 

It shames us and our political representation. It shames our government and the forces within it that are inimical to Waterford city. 

The blurb is surely enough to soften the cough of our Chamber of Commerce and elected council. “Advanced technology is the new gold. Nearly half of global investors now target AI and advanced tech sectors as their top opportunity, according to Bloomberg FDI data. These technologies drive the resilience and adaptability that define competitive advantage. While opportunities exist in every region, advanced tech R&D is most likely to flourish in a location with an abundance of skilled workers, strong state support and deep sectoral expertise, and where investment is rewarded. A tour of five Irish tech hubs reveals how the world’s digital future is being redrawn on the Emerald Isle.” 

This article is a gratuitous insult to Waterford.

Government plans talk of balanced regional development and Waterford as the regional economic driver. Do you believe that?