Phoenix: Waiting for Godot?

In a letter of 25th March 2024, then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar informed Waterford TD Matt Shanahan that 100 major third-level capital projects had been built since 2011 when the proposed WIT new engineering and business school buildings were cancelled. 

Much has been made of the €3/4million spent on buying the old glass site as distinct from actually building anything for SETU, but the state spending nationally on new third-level buildings from 2016 to 2023 was €645,924,766.23. 

The small change at the end of that sum is 23 cent more than the entire amount spent on new teaching buildings at WIT/SETU in that period, because nothing has been spent here on new third-level teaching facilities in almost 20 years. 

This is the educational crime of the century, unequalled in Ireland, the suppression of WIT, a fine institution... for political purposes? 

The people of Waterford know that buildings, which were the subject of a PPP in 2009 and for which a vacant, weed-covered site was prepared at a cost of €2.9 million in 2008 and is now surrounded by rusty fences on the Cork Road in Waterford, were cancelled by the 2011 Fine Gael-led government. 

The last new teaching building on the Cork Road campus, the humanities building at the junction of the Cork Road and Browne’s Road, was started in 1998.

Waiting for Godot, the play by Samuel Beckett, has two characters, Vladimir and Estragon who engage in a variety of discussions while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. As our long, hot (not) summer drifts into autumn and the expiry date of 17th December 2024 for planning permission number 19669 of November 2019, which allows for the construction of the proposed new engineering building at SETU Waterford, looms ever closer, the Beckettian conversations now inevitably ask, will it go ahead?

Our present Taoiseach Simon Harris, formerly Minister for Further Education, pulled the proposed new Waterford engineering building from PPP Bundle 1 in 2020 to force WIT to merge with Carlow IT, to create SETU. While the WIT and Carlow merger has happened, and five new buildings have been constructed at Carlow IT in recent years (risibly described as from “their own resources” by the Fine Gael faithful), nothing has been built in Waterford. 

As the number of PPP contractors seeking to build the new engineering building has shrunk to a single tender, the costs have escalated. Mr Harris has been, if not hoist, then at least damaged financially, with his own petard. The extent of collateral damage to SETU Waterford will only be assessable when 2024 CAO applicant numbers become available.

Mr Harris’s public pledge last month, to get the “job done for Waterford” on cardiology, airport and university, has yet to see action. Irish Times political columnist Pat Leahy predicts a General Election on November 15 next. Time is short and who could vote for Mr Harris if construction has not started on this project? 

Construction has started on a major new extension to Newtown School in the city, adding grist to the election rumour, as does the story in last week’s paper that Health Minister Donnelly will be here mid-September for the commencement of a new surgical hub at UHW. This development is very much a rescue parachute for local minister Mary Butler whose tenure in the Dept. of Health has been characterized by a bizarre failure to ensure UHW received a proportionate share of acute capital investment as a Model 4 hospital. 

It is now rumoured (crocodile tears not backed by money?) that HSE management fully acknowledges that UHW has been neglected in terms of capital development.

Anyone looking at the HSE reply to our reporter Darragh Murphy, carried in last week’s paper, would eye roll at the delays and lack of progress affecting Waterford health projects. The impenetrable bureau-speak that accompanies HSE responses testifies to the “sweets in a jar” nature of its capital development process. Talk of strategic assessment reports, preliminary business cases, design team appointment, scoping exercises, refurbishment reviews, capital estates reviews etc, are summarised: “Project currently at the initiation stage and no exact commencement date is known.”

Only those with political power can have a sweet from the capital development jar. Is Minister Butler, who failed to have any acute capital resources delivered to UHW in 2023, in that category? Many HSE Model 3 hospitals around the country have had more capital investment under this government since 2020 than UHW. 

Expansion of manpower and budget at UHW is certainly welcome, but the same level of expansion, give or take, has happened at every other hospital in the country, bar none. 

UHW’s last major development was the Dunmore Wing in 2018. No other Model 4 hospital has been so denied capital investment, yet no other Model 4 hospital has delivered such results and efficiencies with such relatively slender resources. Excellence has gone un-rewarded. 

In house HSE reports are adamant that UHW is defined and nationally accepted as a Model 4 hospital. So where’s the equity? 

During the recent UHW transfer from Cork-based SSWHG to the new Slaintecare Dublin and South East region, there are whispers that Waterford HSE projects were deliberately allowed wither on the vine.

As a corollary, Emmet Malone’s article in last Thursday’s Irish Times can only be read with a sense of bewilderment. 40% of 19,328 doctors working in Ireland last year received their qualifications outside Ireland. The government has even invested in medical schools in Derry and Belfast, yet the possibility of a medical school, for many the very essence of what a university is, has not been prioritised by SETU. 

Even nursing school numbers are capped in comparison to other institutions. 

Between SETU and UHW, Waterford has all the requirements for a graduate medical school. UPMC has expressed interest in such a development without response. One suspects, as ever, that maintenance of the Cork/Dublin status quo is at fault.

If Taoiseach Harris really wants to deliver a university of scale and quality in Waterford and the South East as he has stated, a new engineering school building would start, new courses in veterinary medicine and ophthalmology would be granted, and the development of a medical school with UHW would be front and centre on his agenda.