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

Meath is a great county. It is well located and has good land. Its people are well educated, industrious, creative and conscientious. While it is a given that every Member will regularly come into this Chamber and claim that his or her county needs further funding, this is not a typical Member's whinge.

Meath is unique in that it is an outlier when it comes to State funding and investment. There are 28 local authorities in the State. In the context of practically every single investment criteria, Meath is last on the list. Louth, Kildare and Wicklow are comparable to Meath in terms of both distance from Dublin and population size. In 2017, there were 1,419 IDA Ireland jobs in Meath. In Kildare, there were 9,282. That is six times the number of IDA Ireland jobs in Meath. Louth and Wicklow have significantly smaller populations than Meath, but they had 3,702 and 2,264 IDA jobs respectively. Westmeath, with one third of the population of County Meath, also has double the number of IDA Ireland jobs.

Meath has the highest number of commuters in the country. This morning, more Meath people left the county in order to get to work than actually work in the county. Navan is the largest town in the country without a rail line. If we are going to assign to Meath the status of commuter county, the Government should at least put in the infrastructure to allow that to happen. Bus Éireann services in the county over the past six months have been a joke. No other county sees its bus services fail continually to show up and leave commuters stranded for hours. This creates a radical difficulty with hundreds of hours wasted on commuting. It also costs Meath people significantly when they have to commute outside of the county.

Meath has the lowest business rates base per capitain the country. If one adds that to the crap local government investment we get from the Government, it means we have the lowest expenditure per local authority per capitain the State. Meath’s spend in this area is 61% of the national average. Expenditure on housing and building by Meath’s local authority is 45% of the national average. Spending on recreational amenities is 43% of the national average. Spending on water services in Meath is 60% of the national average. County Meath has the lowest number of gardaí deployed in the State. Whole swathes of Meath would have no more than a handful of gardaí on duty at any one time. Meath is the only county without a divisional headquarters. True to form, Louth and Meath are at the bottom nationally for funding for mental health services. Meath has the lowest local authority expenditure and the lowest number of county council staff per capita. That has a radical effect on the level of service delivery in Meath.

Why is it that such inequalities exist an hour from Dublin? Logically, there should be some level of equality with regard to the delivery of funding. When will the Government change that?

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