Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will be honest that when the Western Development Commission was established, I thought it was a token agency. Unfortunately my view has not changed. I am not saying that the people there are not doing their best with the tools given to them but the Government refused to take the west seriously. It was set up to deal with an urgent problem that was there at a time of the famous bishops' campaign. It was a token agency to which the Government would not give similar powers as Enterprise Ireland or IDA Ireland, or powers like Údarás na Gaeltacht has or the Shannon Free Airport Development Company, SFADco, had at the time. Rather than giving the agency real executive powers to get on with the job and compete, they gave it a kind of research role with a tiny remit. I want to be clear that I am not blaming the witnesses or the board, with whom I have worked over the years, or the executive. However, if anyone were to suggest to me that the Western Development Commission is a large, powerful agency in the west, I would tell them to look at their budget, staffing level and statutory powers. They are not powerful because they are not allowed to be. People sometimes confuse criticism of a national structure set up by us in this House with criticism of the agency that is there. I recognise that with the resources it has been given that the agency has worked efficiently. However, much more could be done in the west.

Can the witnesses answer something that puzzles me? They do a lot of research and are very good on that. I asked a parliamentary question of the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport - by God, it is a complicated Department to deal with - about what money had come in from the European Union for transport infrastructure from around 2005 to date. I am not sure of the dates. I thought I would get an answer. I thought it would know where the funds came through because I thought they were all siphoned through the centre, which they are. However, the Department wrote out to every agency involved and now I have a pile that I will have to go through. A quick perusal suggests they were very small for the whole of Ireland. In other words, all our motorways were not built with EU money, as most of the public think, they were actually built with national money. I am not interested in €0.5 million here or €2 million there, that is kids' money in real development terms, but sums of €100 million to €300 million. I do not want to know about agricultural payments, such as ANC, PBS, and TAMS payments, which are compensation to farmers for getting a bad price for cattle. In structural funds for infrastructure, what serious money is coming from the EU? Is there really serious money available that if we just put our hands out we can grab it and it will flow in? I do not believe there is any but maybe the witnesses do because they are the type of people who know things like that.

On the trans-European transport network, TEN-T, I do not know who is codding who here. The Chairman will be very surprised about what I have to say on this. I did some research on this four or five years ago. The story was going around the west that the Government was doing things so I put in freedom of information, FOI, requests. I provided the response to the people who had raised the matter with me. It was somewhat messy because when one puts in an FOI request, one receives information here or there. Perhaps the witnesses have analysed this, but my reading was that the reason the core mainly came down the east coast - although I accept that the Minister, Deputy Michael Noonan may have looked after Limerick in relation to Foynes - was directed by the EU. It is the unseen hand. We do not designate any areas in Ireland for special areas of conservation, SACs. The Government proposes them but it has no choice because the EU sets down the criteria, and if one does not provide them, they come back and demand that more be identified. Can witnesses tell me if this was a unilateral decision on behalf of the Irish Government or was there an unseen hand operating from Europe that wanted infrastructure down the east coast because it had an interest in a trans-European network that would be very much focused on where the traffic was? It would be useful to have an answer to that.

I notice that the commission did some work on rail freight. I have never seen that as being the answer to our desire to have a proper rail network in the west. The province of Connacht has a population of around 500,000 and the city of Dublin has a population of approximately 1.1 million. If we look at investment in rail in Dublin for 1.1 million compared to the half million in the west, it is much more than twice the amount. If one pays tax according to the ability to pay - one should get services from the State according to some objective criteria, even based on population - we are getting skinned. Despite the myth, the reality is that we in rural areas get much less per head on many services. There are about 40,000 people in the major towns, Ballina, Castlebar, Claremorris, Tuam, Westport, north of Athenry. I have looked at journey times and commuting patterns to Dublin from towns such as Tullamore, Longford and Mullingar.

The train journey between Maynooth and Pearse Station takes three quarters of an hour and nobody thinks that is an unreasonable commute. It takes about the same time to get from Greystones, very much a commuter town, to Connolly Station.

Commuter services are high-volume in nature, much more so than intercity services. The term "intercity" is a bit of a misnomer in this country. Most people using the trains, even the so-called intercity trains, are commuting. There might be a reasonably high number travelling between Dublin and Cork but even on that service, many people get on that train at Thurles, Portlaoise, etc. Who would have responsibility to ask the WDC to compile a study on commuter and airport rail potential into Galway and Limerick, from the Clare side, since the commission does not operate outside of Clare? In the short term, a service in this regard would link Claremorris to Athenry and Athlone, Ennis and Limerick to Galway, and vice versa, Galway to Limerick. What are the drivers of commuter rail services internationally? Does the train have to arrive between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., which seems to me to be a basic criterion? I have done some work on this myself. That work has given rise to interesting answers. If trains do not leave at certain times in the evening when people are finishing work, there is not much point in calling them commuter services. Are there examples of similarly populated areas that have efficient commuter rail services which attract passengers? It would be useful to know whether it is possible to have such services and, also, what is the best practice in areas with populations of similar size?

One could create 2,000 or 3,000 jobs in the west overnight without going to IDA Ireland or Enterprise Ireland or asking for any money. It would be awfully easy. It could be done by means of decentralisation, a dirty word which we should say quietly. Has the WDC done a study on the positive and negative impacts of decentralisation? Is it difficult or does it give rise to inefficiency? Are the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection's offices in Sligo, Carrick-on-Shannon and Buncrana and the Department of Finance's office in Galway much more inefficient than those Department's offices in Dublin? The Department of Rural and Community Development and parts of the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment are based in Ballina. Are they laggards or, as I suspect, leaders when it comes to efficiency? Is there a need to move huge numbers of people up and down to Dublin every week for meetings or do a few assistant principal officers and principal officers come up every few weeks? If they did not come up to Dublin, would there be a need for people from head office to travel down? Decentralisation has taken place over a long period and not just during the lifetime of the Government of which I was a member when it was done successfully. It was happening long before that. How major a contributor is it to the regions? As with other studies whereby one is trying to discover what would happen if one took a particular course of action, the great thing about that study is that it has been done and we are aware of the impact. As a result, it is possible to extrapolate the impact of having another 2,000 or 3,000 jobs in a particular location.

An examination of the Civil Service transfer list shows that many more people want to get out of Dublin than want to come here. In the context of decentralisation, is there a problem in getting people to accept particular jobs? Is it difficult to fill them? There are all the usual questions. There is huge potential to relieve Dublin of its problems, particularly as it cannot handle what it has, and not by means of transferring them to Galway, which also cannot handle what it has. The places that can handle them include Carrick-on-Shannon and, to a degree, Sligo. I still deeply regret that An Bord Pleanála decided to turn down the proposal to build the Government Department headquarters at Ireland West Airport in Knock, which would have given rise to a little concentration of development at that location. There is a great road service on the east-west north-south link cross south of Charlestown between it and the airport. Some great gurus in Dublin could not get their heads around that. These might be useful things to do.

The Minister, Deputy Ring, the Minister of State, Deputy Kyne, and I visited the back of a hill in the middle of nowhere the other day. At the back of the hill in the middle of nowhere there is an industry. Some 120 people are employed on the floor of that industry. Another 100 go in and out of that industry every day, so there are over 200 people on site most days. It is a timber industry, so there are another 100 out in the forest. That is not a small industry. It is in the middle of nowhere on the back of a hill. Despite popular myths that rural Ireland can only sustain micro-industries, there are some major employers in the region. There is an urban myth that these industries are not sustainable and that one cannot locate a big industry on the back of a hill in the middle of nowhere. Would the WDC consider performing a mapping exercise of manufacturing businesses?

I found another business, although this one is not located on the back of a hill. It is located in a flat place not too far from the area the WDC oversees. I was in Supermac's in Cappataggle one night having a cup of tea and a guy came over to me. He said he had a little business down the road and asked if I would come to see it. I happened to be going to Loughrea the following weekend to visit a school. I decided to call in to find that there were 40 jobs in a boithrín in the middle of nowhere. It would be interesting to exclude Galway, Castlebar, Sligo and their environs and to try to map all the manufacturing industries that employ more than ten people in the WDC area and discover how many jobs there are within it. Most of these businesses have a local reason to be where they are, and the jobs created indirectly could be extrapolated. The commission will find that when it comes to manufacturing jobs, the centre of Dublin does not have most of the manufacturing jobs and that there are many businesses operating along the highways and byways of rural Ireland, despite the planning rules that are there to try to stop all of this. They make an enormous contribution to the economy. The great thing is that they are not really adding too much to the traffic chaos.

Looking at services in a similar way, there is an accountancy firm near where I live in a village that does not have 20 houses in it. The firm employs ten or 15 people. If the owner gets his broadband by the end of the year, he will probably add another ten employees. He is doing accounts from London. It is not a local accountancy firm. He has no problem getting staff. He has a very nice place from which to operate. We seem to have closed our minds to all these marvellous possibilities. We need to start mapping what is there despite less than conducive conditions.

How much cash does the commission have in the WIF? What cash is in hand? Are enough people coming in to look for that money or is the commission too constrained in the context of disbursing it?

I have seen figures of €13 million, €20 million and €30 million, which is joke money in the context of developing a region. I mean no disrespect to the Western Development Commission. It was not given any more so I am not blaming it. I spoke about a small business on the other side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. It invested between €20 million and €30 million on one side in the past ten years. That is what it takes, as I know, having been involved in that kind of development, albeit on a small scale compared with what is possible nowadays. The one thing I found out is that just because it is a rural location, it does not suddenly get cheap.

I will not discuss the issue of broadband. The Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment should get on with the job of putting fibre into every house in the country and ensuring everyone has access to a mobile phone. That should not require more research. It is just a question of getting somebody to do a very simple job of running some cable along existing telephone lines and into businesses. There is no rocket science involved. It is as simple as putting up electric lines was when they were first installed.

I ask the witnesses to elaborate a little on the talent tool the WDC uses.