John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will try to be as narrow and specific as I possibly can, given that the discussion is broad and there is very little time. I thank the witnesses for being present today. I will start with Mr. Joe Crockett. He spoke about the general issue of harmonisation of national, regional and local policies, which is critical. I have been thinking about that myself. Ms Widger gave two specific examples of pieces of infrastructure that need consideration, namely, the airport and the ports. I will single out the airport. It is a critical time now for the airport, which is a key piece of infrastructure, and we have been talking about it for a long time. The manager of the airport, Mr. Graham Doyle, is leaving - which is bad news, in my opinion - to become an assistant secretary in the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport. It is significant that he is departing. There are three options for the airport. We are talking about €1.25 million for the first and cheapest option. The second option would cost approximately €7 million. To bring 737s into Waterford would cost approximately €10 million. Realistically, we are talking about an extension that would cost approximately €1.25 million, the cost of a three-bedroom semi-detached house in parts of this city a few years ago. It is not a lot of money. As far as the Department is concerned, the case is being made, successfully, that it is worth investing in the airport. The people who have worked there for the past four years have used every penny to try to lay the ground at the airport for additional expansion at the north and south ends of the runway to bring in different kinds of jet aircraft, as Ms Widger outlined, and to connect to London in particular.

I will come to what Mr. Crockett said, but we have a national issue in terms of how we look at our budgets and how flexible and adaptable our budgets are generally. I wish to focus on the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport for a moment, and examine how money is allocated. We all have a responsibility - to use the words of the Minister, Deputy Varadkar - to invest in infrastructure and other items that are drivers of growth. If we are all of the opinion that the airport is a key piece of infrastructure then we must examine the entirety of the transport budget and ask ourselves one question, namely, whether we are prioritising what we should prioritise from the budget. In that context, the answer is "No". I am having a discussion on the matter with the Minister currently.

In terms of the way it works, there is a capital budget for roads, a capital budget for rail and a capital budget for smarter travel. There are projects such as the Greenway projects throughout the country. When it comes to the local authorities, they have some discretion to use the money allocated to them for a capital project, such as the airport, but it is not entirely within their "ask" responsibility to do that. My point is that budgets within the Department are not flexible enough. If we are all in agreement that this is a key piece of infrastructure, and it does not involve a lot of money, why has it not been done?

Mr. Walsh said he did not want to be political but in the past ten years, and with respect to my Fianna Fáil colleague on my right, the decline of those two key pieces of infrastructure started when there was a Cabinet member in Waterford, and everybody in Waterford will acknowledge that. The decline of the port and the airport started while that was the case, but we are where we are.

In terms of what we need to do, the country managers are present. Picking up on what Mr. Crockett said with regard to the harmonisation of the regional, the national and the local, we have to have an urgent discussion within the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport on what we believe are the key pieces of infrastructure and what needs to be funded. That might mean examining the budgets for roads and smarter travel and deciding that we may not need all of that. It may not be wise for us to continue spending millions of euro on something like smarter travel when a vital piece of infrastructure for the south east is not being funded sufficiently, and it does not involve a lot of money. We have these meetings all the time but it is key that we deal with a specific area and start thinking about how to get around a problem that has existed for a long time. If we do not do that, we will be having this discussion five years from now. In a way that answers Deputy Calleary's question about the way we spend the money. The question is the way we should be spending money in the different regions.

I thank Senator Cullinane for his work on putting all of this together. It is valuable. I hope we can get something out of it, but that is the main question I wanted to pose.