Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We all welcome the concept of a development plan, looking to the future and planning for the future, and we know it has to happen. As a Government, a society and a people we need to look to the future and to try to plan ahead in order to know where we are going and what we are at now. The difficulty that many of us have spelled out with regard to this plan is that the draft which we saw in the beginning had many holes in it and many problems. A number of Deputies, particularly Opposition Deputies, came together, pointed to that and caused a bit of a row to ensure that something would happen in this regard.

I attended the launch in Sligo last Friday. While the Taoiseach spoke and complained about Opposition Deputies trying to cause division, I looked behind him and saw the Ministers, Deputy Michael Ring and Deputy Heather Humphreys, and the Minister of State, Deputy Joe McHugh, as well as other Deputies sitting there. There was certainly little or nothing in the draft plan for their constituencies. I expect they were as vocal behind the scenes as we were out front as to what needed to be done to change this plan and to put something in place that would really deliver for rural areas. In fairness, the draft plan was not delivering for rural areas and the division the Taoiseach spoke about existed because of the absolute absence of measures to look after the midlands and the west. The big problem I have with many of these things is that long-term planning has a problem. There was also the big problem which I have with many of these things.

The problem with long-term planning is that when people look to something way into the future, it is a distraction from the immediate crisis. We are all conscious that we have an immediate crisis, particularly in housing and our health care services. We have an immediate crisis of rural depopulation in many parts of the country. Those crises need to be dealt with now. The real test of this plan will not be what it will do over 20 years but what it will do in the next three years. It is in the next three years that we need to see the money being put up to ensure that we deliver. Now is the time. Timing is everything in these situations. It is quite clear that unless something happens quickly, particularly in respect of the housing crisis, rural depopulation and transport services in the city of Dublin and many other places, we will have ongoing crises. Much of the criticism of the plan has been that the money that is proposed to be delivered is spread out over a lengthy time. Unless there is a lot of front-loading, we will not see the benefit of it.

Money that is spent will leverage more money. It will bring more private money out onto the field and get people working and things moving again. I particularly think of rural Ireland, being a Deputy representing Sligo-Leitrim, west Cavan, south Donegal and north Roscommon. We have a notorious problem with rural depopulation. Our small schools are closing down or are losing teachers because we do not have any children any more. Part of that problem is that people cannot build houses in rural Ireland. I know one-off rural housing is an issue in many places where there is an over-proliferation of it but, certainly where I come from, the problem is that we do not have any. That is an issue that needs to be dealt with. I know the Minister of State is aware of that and of the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, guidelines. Something has to be done about the problem of meeting the confines of the Water Framework Directive. However, the EPA went too far and caused a crisis in the other direction. The lesson is that absolute rules do not work and we need to find a solution that is not as absolute as this one.

The issue was brought up at the launch of the €1 billion that is to be spent in rural towns over the next years. That is a good policy if it can happen. The scheme that is in place at present to help regenerate rural areas and small towns provides a loan of up to €40,000 to renovate a property to house a person on the local authority list. It has not worked. There is no take-up on it and it is not going to work. Something more substantive needs to be put in place. If we took ten small towns in County Leitrim, for example, and were €1 million to be spent in each of those towns, it would generate a lot of work. It would give a lot of people renewed hope that something was going to happen and it would provide housing in those towns. If we gave a 70% grant, we would get most of it back in the taxes that would be generated because when people get a grant to do something, they spend more money than what the grant provides. On the law of averages with tax, excise duty, income taxes, VAT and all those things, we would get most of that money back. There is also the multiplier effect because when activity is happening, it creates opportunity and more activity. That is the road the Government needs to go down as quickly as possible.

We need big projects to happen, such as the western rail corridor from Sligo, where we were on Friday, down through Galway and Limerick, through Tipperary and into the Port of Waterford. With Brexit looming, it would be a means of getting freight off the road and getting a port that can send goods straight across to the European mainland. This is an opportunity to do that. Under the European funding for low-carbon transport initiatives, under the TEN-T programme, the Government could get up to 75% funding if it made it an electric railway. That opportunity has been missed but may come up again in the next couple of years to be applied for and secured. It would make a great difference to that whole region.

There is a lot of stuff missing in this plan. Really the problem is the absence of imagination. Just repackaging old stuff, putting it out and calling it a plan is not good enough any more.

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