Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to show the Minister of State a map which he may have seen before. It is a map the Northern and Western Regional Assembly published a number of years ago. If one looks at it the deficit in infrastructure in the north-west of Ireland, working its way down to the west, is very clear. Let us look at it. There is no motorway network to the fourth largest city on the island, Derry, and County Donegal. There are about 500,000 people in the cross-Border region of west County Tyrone, County Donegal and County Derry. There is no rail connection and no motorway connection.

For the past ten years, the Government has starved the City of Derry Airport although 40% of the passengers who go through it come from Donegal. It has got no funding from the Government for the past ten years. Funding was removed when the Derry to Dublin airport link was taken down. There is no road or motorway infrastructure, no rail and no air connecting approximately half the county of Donegal and all of Derry. It is stunning. It is the same for electricity infrastructure. We have said this for many years. This motion is so important because we in the west and north west of Ireland do not have a motorway or rail connection joining up the west of Ireland. Cork, Limerick, Galway, Sligo, Derry and that huge mass of population in the west has no motorway connectivity for nearly all of it and no rail connectivity for a big part of it. That has to be the priority, but from reading the national development plan it is not at all clear to me that this Government gets the scale of the neglect of the west and north west of my county of Donegal, right down to Cork. It needs to be addressed and prioritised. I agree with Deputy Calleary that we now need a committee to come to grips with this because successive Governments and senior civil servants have failed to do so. We need a sense of urgency and an investment plan. We need to work with the likes of the Northern and Western Regional Assembly, which has no political axe to grind. Its members are just speaking the truth. I will hold up the map again to show the damning indictment of the failure of our people in the west and north west.

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