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

This is the third manifestation of this Department in just over a year. In May 2016, the Government announced the addition of the regional and rural responsibilities to the existing Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht in response, I imagine, to the critical level of debate in the 2016 election on the need for the Government to elevate address of the crisis that was developing in rural and regional Ireland. The problem with that particular exercise, with which the Minister may agree, although not publicly, is that it was in the main a cosmetic exercise in that the necessary powers or budgets were not transferred to the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs to allow it to do the work which its title claimed it would do. For example, the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Naughten, retained control over broadband and all the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs could do was put in place a few people in certain local authorities to identify if there were any small problems they could iron out. Also, responsibility for spatial planning remained with the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, Deputy Coveney, and his Department. Spatial planning should be at the centre of regional development. Regional development should not be the responsibility of one particular Department and spatial planning the responsibility of another Department. As I said, the fact that the budgets were transferred made it difficult for the new Department to carry out its work.

For Members on this side of the House, this was extremely disappointing. There is serious economic damage being done in this country. The chasm that exists between parts of this island, economically, demographically and socio-economically, is incredible. I believe there has been an over-concentration of population and economic activity in a very small space on the east coast and a damaging emptying of population on the west coast. Counties such as Mayo and Donegal have experienced population decreases during the inter-census period of 2011 to 2016. In many other counties there were minute marginal increases in population while the population on the east coast increased massively. As we know, Dublin is growing out of kilter. As I have said previously, we are in serious danger of developing a city-state island - a city surrounded by a national park. That is how stark this is.

The Minister makes the good point on a regular basis that people should not be negative towards rural areas or regional areas but we also should not censor ourselves with regard to identifying problems. If we do that, we will not be able to draw attention to problems and have them addressed. There is a rake of problems in regional and rural areas. The main problem is that the location of decent jobs is on the east coast. Teagasc has produced a very good report on this issue, in which it indicates that young families with young children need two incomes to survive and, as the only place where they can get those two incomes is on the eastern corridor, they are, in general, moving towards the east. What does this do? It creates radical problems for infrastructural spend.

It means that new schools have to be built on the east coast while schools are emptying on the west coast. There is no capital investment logic for that. It means that important services on the west coast have to be closed, and then opened up on the east coast. One of members of the senior management team of An Post informed the committee of which I am Chairman that 500 post offices in this State are unsustainable. In large part, that is a reflection of what is happening with the shift to the east coast. Unemployment is currently three times higher in the Border regions than is the case in Dublin. In certain parts of the west, broadband speeds are 36 times slower than in the centre of Dublin.

The north-west region is without a rail line or a motorway. Gaining access to the north west is very difficult for those in business. Businesses are very simple entities. A business will set up in a space where it can attract customers, communicate with those customers and transport its product or service to them. If it cannot do that, it will locate elsewhere. We know that the demographic changes in the south west to which I referred mean that Balbriggan - on the east coast - has the youngest population in the country and that Killarney has the oldest. Demographic profiles are changing as young couples move. The change has been shocking. I covered the enterprise brief on behalf of my party in the previous Dáil. In the five-year lifetime of that Dáil under the previous Fine Gael Government, IDA Ireland pumped 60% of all foreign direct investment, FDI, into Dublin and Cork. In 2010 and 2011, the figure was as low as 20% of FDI going outside the Dublin and Cork regions.

This is not anti-Dublin bias. I want to see Dublin become an international city of renown and to be able to compete internationally. The fact is, however, that the more Dublin expands without planning, the more difficult it becomes for people living and working in Dublin. We all know that it is very difficult for individuals to get to their places of work during rush hour. We have heard much about the baptism ban but, in fact, there is a building barrier in this country because the Government is not building the necessary schools. People find it very difficult to get their children into schools. Water shortages are happening in Dublin at the moment. We are increasingly told that the headroom in respect of water is very small in Dublin, which means that this Government is seeking to take water from the Parteen basin along the Shannon in the mid-west region and bring it to Dublin. The logic, again, should be that the Government should look at developing Limerick and similar cities in a regional capacity so that they would be able to allow for infrastructure to be used more evenly.

One of the most disappointing items of information to emerge at meetings of my committee in the past year was that relating to the Western Development Commission. In his new role in this Department, I hope the Minister will focus his attention on this matter because the Western Development Commission is a very useful organisation, so much so that my own party examined the possibility of replicating its structure in other regions. Mr. Paddy McGuinness was the chairman of the Western Development Commission. He is a friend of the former Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny. He was given the job of being the chairman of that commission. He came before the committee and - this is on the record of the committee - that the Western Development Commission has had its budget and its level of staffing slashed. Considerable funding which was assigned to the Western Development Commission was put in a capital budget space, even though the need was for a current rather than a capital spend. It was mind-blowing. The Western Development Commission was given money that it could not spend, which is incredible, and it still cannot spend it. As a result, many organisations that work with the Western Development Commission are being held up with regard to investment due to this particular spend.

Mr. McGuinness has said that the position of CEO in the Western Development Commission has been vacant for five years. It is incredible that this is the case. There has been no board in the Western Development Commission since February of this year, which means that it is rudderless. The latter means that community organisations cannot get the necessary funding and are being left in limbo. Mr. McGuinness went further than that. He said that the Western Development Commission was hamstrung, oppressed and hampered by the Department and that the only time the Department ever took an interest in the commission was on the issue of its governance. That must make the Minister's blood boil. It makes my blood boil to realise that we have a functional, decent organisation operating in one of the most disadvantaged parts of our country and that it is materially discriminated against and worked against by the Department. The latter is creating a blockage in the context of the development which would naturally and organically happen in that part of the country.

The other issue about which I am concerned in respect of the Department is the fact that the word "Regional" has been deleted from its title. The Minister may say that he is going to keep an eye on regional development and that is going to be a task of his Department - and a greater task for the other Departments as well - but we know that the titles of Departments reflect their priorities. If a particular objective is not set out in the title of a Department, the opportunity of giving that objective priority is missed. Those involved in the arts logically become annoyed when the word "Arts" is left out of a Department's name. Those in Gaeltacht areas logically become annoyed when its name is left out. The word "Regional" has been deleted from the name of the Minister's Department. I think that is a mistake. Rural areas are more regional in their location, but there are rural areas in County Meath, which is also in the greater Dublin area. The two issues are not mutually exclusive.

In addition to my concerns regarding the changes in their titles, I also have a difficulty with the lack of work that happens in these Departments. Rural and regional areas are experiencing a crisis in the context of broadband. Mr. Dermot Ahern, a former Fianna Fáil Deputy, was the first to promise the provision of broadband services throughout the whole State. He promised that in 2004. Mr. Noel Dempsey, another former Deputy and a county colleague of mine, promised that every house in the State would have broadband by 2010. Deputy Eamon Ryan from the Green Party promised that we would have broadband for all by 2012 and, in 2014, the Fine Gael Government stated that the entire country would have broadband by 2020. In 2016, that target was stretched out further to 2022. Now the Minister, Deputy Denis Naughten, has admitted that the plan may not actually be completed by that date and has started to suggest a target date of 2024. We can have all the name changes and departmental changes that we like, but if we do not have the implementation of key policy such as that relating to broadband, we are going to find it very difficult. This is horizon politics. Each of those particular politicians to whom I refer stated that the sunny day when rural Ireland would have broadband was on the horizon. However, the problem is that as we get closer to those dates, the horizon shifts out farther and that sunny date becomes more and more difficult to reach.

Agriculture is obviously a major concern for the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and, I hope, for the new Department for which the Minister, Deputy Ring, will have responsibility. The problem is - Teagasc reflected this as well - the really shocking figure that only 37% of farmers in this State are economically viable. It is mind-blowing that 63% of farmers currently operating in this State are not independently economically viable.

I ask the Minister to focus on the Leader programme. Our committee held public meetings in Bailieborough and Athboy. People came to us from Cavan, Monaghan, Westmeath and Meath and told us that only one or two people in those counties had been approved for Leader funding in the past year. There were 18 separate steps from start to finish for a particular business to achieve. If one was to purposefully design the most bureaucratic nightmare for a small business - and a small business in a rural area would not have experience with bureaucracy and would be averse to it - and to stop individuals in it from doing anything, one would design a way of having 18 steps before it could get the necessary funding to allow those people to do their particular jobs.

Change is good and necessary but I worry that in the new manifestation of the Minister's Department, we will see more change management. Anyone involved in organisational management will say that if one keeps changing the structure of an organisation, more energy goes into managing that change than achieving the organisation's objectives. The HSE is rife with this. Each time there is a new Minister for Health, he or she wants to change the structures and management becomes sucked into a black hole of managing that change. The patients, whom one would hope are the HSE's objective, are left towards the end.

There is also a question of a departmental turf war which the Minister is long enough in politics to be able to identify. Deputy Ó Cuív identified a major gap in this legislation in that we do not know the exact responsibilities and functions this new Department will have. I wish the Minister all the luck in the world in ensuring the necessary tools for regional, spatial and rural development come under his Department because all the other Ministers, and their staff, will fight tooth and nail to prevent that happening. We saw that in the previous Government. We want a real Department, not just an edifice with nothing behind it.

The Department will need a certain level of investment, and the type of control the Minister has on his budget is important. This country has the second lowest capital infrastructural spend in the EU. Romania beats us to the last position. We are hearing a lot of talk about a rainy day fund. If the Minister had a house with a massive mortgage and its roof was blown off, would the Minister fix the roof and pay down the mortgage or would he decide to put his money into a rainy day fund and leave himself without a roof and with a massive mortgage? It is logical to tackle the infrastructural problem with the house and, when that was complete, to pay off some of the debt, after which one might put a few bob aside for a rainy day fund. The idea of creating a rainy day fund when there are massive infrastructural gaps in this country is nonsense. One cannot travel to the north west by rail or by motorway. There is no broadband three miles outside Navan. I am sure that is also the case three miles outside Westport. When we do not have these things, the money needs to be directed into their provision. Capital spend is not a waste of money. It is money that makes money. That is its logic. I ask the Minister to look at that issue.

The Government must consider the all-Ireland context in which we live. In January 2016, I carried out a report on the all-Ireland economy during which I interviewed around 100 organisations, including the Confederation of British Industry, the unions and the Ulster farmers. Everyone I spoke to felt that if we planned, funded and delivered together, we would have more efficient and better services for everyone on the island, whether they be cancer services in Altnagelvin hospital or an air ambulance based out of Enniskillen for the north west or Daisy Hill Hospital which serves people in the north east. Most experts in this area to whom I spoke said that the all-Ireland economy had fallen off the agenda. After the Good Friday Agreement, it had been the great new hope, but nothing but lip service was paid to it between 2011 and 2016. The Minister is a decent man and I believe if he had the opportunity to do something about this, he would. That is why I tabled an amendment to include "all-Ireland" in the name of the Department because we cannot continue to develop the island spatially on a Twenty-six Counties or Six Counties basis.

It happened before. During the 1970s the unionist government in the North decided to build a motorway to Newry and then decided to extend it to Warrenpoint, which is a beautiful, small sea village on the coast of County Down. It did not want to build it to Dublin. It took until 2007 to build that motorway going to Dundalk, Drogheda and on to Dublin. Look at the economic energy which has been generated from that Belfast-Dublin corridor. The money the DUP secured from the Tories is largely designated for the three north-eastern counties of the Six Counties. We must ensure all the Departments are aligned. The Minister needs to speak to his private secretary and every member of staff in the Department and tell them nothing can happen in the Department regarding regional and rural planning unless we are consulting our colleagues across the Border. That economic corridor between Letterkenny and Dundalk is one of the most deprived in the State. If the Minister does not use the name I suggested in my amendment, some level of regional, rural and all-island development should be included which would set out the new dispensation for this island in a radical new way. It would say we are not going to plan with our backs to each other and to our own cost. It is a major opportunity to save money on the island while increasing services and should be taken. I wish the Minister luck in his new role.

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