Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Ashmore for his presentation. I wish to go back to the question raised by Deputy Doherty on the motion before the Dáil last week and the fact that we might be putting funds into places which are occupied territories. Will Mr. Ashmore come back on that again?

In Mr. Ashmore’s presentation he talked about balanced regional development. I come from County Galway. There seems to be a theme that investing in the cities of Galway, Limerick and Cork is regional development. It is not. We have a good deal of money in the pot at the moment. We also have a deficit in infrastructure. I want to get Mr. Ashmore’s thoughts on this because I believe we have a potential opportunity to deliver infrastructure to allow the regions to grow. However, there seems to be an attitude of “if there is demand for it, we will put it in”. We have to be brave and start off by putting in the infrastructure and then the people and the jobs will follow. There is a lack of infrastructure in regard to wastewater treatment to enable housebuilding in the regions. With Uisce Éireann concentrating on population centres in regard to delivering infrastructure, we are creating a bigger divide. That has been backed up by the EU when it did the report recently that found the north and west of this country is a lagging region. Would Mr. Ashmore see ISIF being given €500 million for regional investment as being more of the crumbs from the table as opposed to putting it top of the agenda?

In my opinion, if we are seriously talking about investing in climate action, the first thing we need to do is invest in public transport in the regions. I refer to projects such as the western rail corridor, the road from Charlestown to Collooney, Galway City outer bypass and connecting the western rail corridor to Collooney in order to have an actual Atlantic economic corridor region that we would all be proud of, and where people would come to live, work, raise their families and generate population and growth. The theme seems to be that we provide a school or a road if people are there and they are jammed up in traffic whereas we should have a bit more vision and think ahead more. We should ask what we need to put in to make a region work. We have that opportunity. Money is at the disposal of ISIF but because the Northern and Western Regional Assembly area spanning eight counties is a lagging region, we can actually positively discriminate towards that region in terms of infrastructure. We can also extract a higher percentage of Structural Funds from Europe on the basis that it is a lagging region. It is a massive opportunity. Does Mr. Ashmore agree?