Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Rural Ireland is in crisis. This State is rudderless and has been without a spatial plan since 2002. Due to the policies of the Government, the population and economic activity are over-concentrated in an overheating Dublin area. In international comparisons, Dublin's size is far out of kilter. At present, the greater Dublin area accounts for 39% of the population of the State, soon will contain 50% of the population and we are in significant danger of becoming a city state. The decline in rural Ireland is being accelerated under the Minister's watch. Basic services are being downgraded by the Government. According to An Post, approximately 500 post offices are unsustainable. Representatives of Teagasc appeared before the committee I chair a couple of weeks ago and said that 63% of the farmers in this State are economically unsustainable.

Per capitagrowth in the west is quarter of what it is in Dublin and unemployment along the Border is three times higher than it is in Dublin. In some parts of the State, broadband speeds are 36 times slower than in Dublin. The north-west quarter of the country has neither a rail line nor a motorway. The cities of Cork and Limerick are connected with a single-carriageway road. The IDA has for the past ten years pumped approximately 60% of its investment into the Dublin and Cork regions. This is not to mention that the Government has closed 139 Garda stations. It is closing bus routes and has prevented credit unions, which desire to invest their massive amount of capital they have, from so doing in housing and business projects.

This debate is not about being anti-Dublin. It makes no sense to overheat Dublin. Rising house prices, spiralling rents and gridlock on the motorways all make it more difficult to live and survive in Dublin. It is nuts that we are actually talking about taking water from the Parteen basin and bringing it all the way to Dublin because of a lack of water supply there. What about the idea of bringing jobs, housing and people to the Parteen basin instead of spending that level of money on infrastructure? That money would not have to be spent if we had a little bit of balance in our investment here.

This is being driven by emigration and a lack of regional transport and communications infrastructure. The Minister mentioned a heap of different programmes the Government is developing but all the programmes in the world are not worth a damn if a person cannot do business in regional and rural Ireland. The Government can provide all the supports it wants but if people cannot transport their product or staff or cannot communicate with anybody outside of their area, if they cannot get the resources in to create their products and if they are hampered at every turn with regards infrastructure, they simply will not be able to locate in rural areas. That is the most important issue.

Another issue, to which Teagasc pointed, is interesting on a demographic basis. More and more young educated people in this State need two incomes to survive and to pay their massive mortgages and massive rents. The only place they can find those two incomes is in large urban areas. They move to those areas, taking the energy of the generation out of the areas and relocating it in urban areas. This also creates a big age gap between the west and east, militating against development in the country. This Government has a really skewed investment programme across the State.

Agriculture, the backbone in rural areas, is on its knees. Some 37% of farmers are economically sustainable, a phenomenally low figure. This is at the same time as there is a massive hunger for energy but the Government cannot seem to join the dots on this issue. The Minister, Deputy Denis Naughten, has failed to provide any feed-in tariffs to allow farmers to produce small-scale biomass, small-scale solar or wind generation to make sure they can make a profit from the energy that is in their farms. Bord na Móna is importing millions of euro of biomass every year from Madagascar and Mozambique to this country, but we will not provide the supply chains for farmers here to be able to do the same.

In the past ten days Paddy McGuinness resigned as the chairperson of the Western Development Commission, an organisation that covers the Minister's county. He is a former Fine Gael councillor but was extremely forthright and brave in detailing the reasons for his resignation citing the lack of Government commitment to the west as one of the reasons. He stated:

I believe strongly that there is absolutely no commitment at either political or administrative level to balanced regional development nor is there any worthwhile plan to address rural decline. My experience over the last four years has convinced me that the WDC's potential to initiate and deliver progress within the region is neither understood nor supported. For example, the only contacts with me from my parent Department were on matters relating to governance... never an engagement on what the organisation was doing or how it could achieve more.

He said the current programme for Government continued a line of committing to an enhanced role for the Western Development Commission but that, in spite of persistent inquiries at political and administrative levels, the board had not been told exactly what an enhanced role meant or involved. This Government has existed for well over a year and it has not yet told the WDC exactly what it is looking for it to do in the future. Mr. McGuinness's statement cannot have been easy, especially given that he is a friend of the Taoiseach and was appointed by the Taoiseach in 2012.

Níl sa phlean gníomhaíochta d'fhorbairt tuaithe a fhoilsíodh ag tús na bliana ach bileog de shean-bheartaithe, gan breis airgid ann le dul i ngleic leis an scoilt idir uirbeach agus tuaithe. In ainneoin moltaí leanúnacha ó shaineolaithe go ndéanfadh an Rialtas plean fhorbairt tuaithe fadtéarmach a sholáthar, ní maireann an plean is déanaí ach le haghaidh trí bliana. Níl aon modhanna ann le fíor-mheastúchán a dhéanamh ar an dul chun cinn sa phlean. Is é oidhreacht Fhine Gael maidir leis an gceantar tuaithe ná rian millteanach a fhágáil ina dhiaidh mar thoradh ar an neamh-aird agus na polasaithe déine a cuireadh i bhfeidhm.

Another really important statistic to come out during the week was that 87% of physical exports in this State are from the FDI sector, with only 13% from the indigenous sector. This is shocking as it leaves the country massively exposed to a possible FDI shock. Most of the indigenous exports are better geographically distributed than the FDI exports and are based in the regional and rural areas of which we have been talking. Meat exports make up a significant chunk of these. Indigenous business is still the poor relation of the economic policy of this Government. In most countries FDI is known as a transitional policy and most countries try to build FDI so that they can move towards a good, strong, healthy indigenous sector but not this country. FDI is the final resting place of this Government's policy and, as a result, areas which would benefit far more from indigenous development are being left out.

The only thing that matches the lack of political will of this Government is the lack of capital investment. In the last budget it suggested a €300 million increase in capital investment but this is a paltry figure. The Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport was told that €3 billion was needed to get secondary roads up to a safe level but the total increase last year was €300 million. Sinn Féin produced a budget with a €1.2 billion increase in capital investment, all within the unfair EU fiscal rules. I implore the Minister in front of me, who has his heart in the right place but who appears to be on his own in Cabinet, which is deaf to the needs of the people of rural Ireland, to support Deputy Martin Kenny's Bill.

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